


Fighting Fish

by garyindistress



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:35:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garyindistress/pseuds/garyindistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kris is perpetually confused, Zitao is the antidote.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fighting Fish

**Author's Note:**

> For Joie.
> 
> There are a lot of side characters here, including half the cast of [Happy Camp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Camp_\(variety_show\)) ([Wu Xin/Orfila](http://www.wiki86.com/view/360220.htm), [Haitao](http://img01.taobaocdn.com/bao/uploaded/i1/T1GvDmXhNlXXXcHY7W_022641.jpg), [He Jiong](http://wiki.d-addicts.com/He_Jiong)) and a small fraction of SMTown (Zhou Mi, Amber, Henry, to name a few). I'm sorry if the names get confusing!

The road Kris found them driving down led to a cluster of tall apartment buildings, fenced in by two wideset tollbars, one for each coming and going. The man in the entrance booth wore a peaked cap like a police officer and didn't turn when the driver honked. He was preoccupied with a small television set, an old model with antennae, and a styrofoam box of dry noodles.

“Sometimes you have to slip them a couple bucks if you want better service,” Yixing had advised over the phone twenty hours ago. Despite having sat for the last forty minutes while navigating over mostly level ground Kris was still disoriented from the flight, but he managed to find his wallet in the front pocket of his smaller suitcase and fish out a couple newly exchanged bills. It was like learning how to count all over again. He bent into a slouch and knocked on the door of the booth, addressing the security guard as Uncle.

"I'll be in the third building -- apartment 508, Wu Yifan." Smoothly, he retrieved an unopened pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and slid his offerings across the table, where they made contact with the man’s lunch.

He eyed the gifts for a moment before breaking into a welcoming smile. It carried both the allure and permanent yellow staining of a chain-smoker. 

"I didn't know Wu Xin had such a handsome little brother." 

That must've been Orfila's Chinese name. Yixing had said something about that, too. He probably had it written down somewhere. Kris glanced down at his palm. Of course.

The elevators could be unreliable, warned the security guard, who went by Ah-Si. The fourth of seven children. He was too old to work at the factory now, he said, pinching at his skin to show Kris its fading elasticity. There were two elevators, and the one on the left was prone to spontaneous late-night breakdowns.

“Forget about your 1 a.m. ice cream runs,” Ah-Si said, guerilla-patting him on the stomach. 

Kris was embarrassed, because he’d let his gym membership expire quietly last fall. His running sneakers were still collecting dust under the bed back in San Francisco.

“I would recommend taking the stairs. Five flights is nothing for a kid like yourself, am I right?”

“Kid” caught him off-guard. He was twenty-five; nobody had called him that in years. But the endearment carried a soft, weighty comfort, like it was okay for him to have lived a quarter of a century and come up empty-handed. Not a terrible way to be measured by, he couldn’t help thinking as he hauled his suitcase up the uneven stairs.

The peephole to 508 was flanked by two large glossy paper cutouts of a boy and girl in traditional red New Year’s garb, with the character for “fortune” hung upside down above them. He raised his knuckle to the door but it drew open before he could knock.

“Kris?”

He was being hugged.

 

-

 

Yixing had neglected to mention how attractive his contact actually was. “What are you talking about? She’s practically my sister.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she’s—good-looking, man,” Kris whispered into the laptop mic. He wasn’t sure how well his voice carried in the apartment but he didn’t want to find out. The curtains framing the window of his room were lace-white, too flimsy for proper noise absorption. They allowed sunlight through as easily as a pair of paper ghosts. He was already dreading the morning. Even though he couldn’t be classified as a light sleeper, adjusting to a new location always took time.

“Don’t do it, Wu Yifan.” 

Yixing made a guillotine motion with his hand and his neck. Out of the corner of the screen Ann was nosing her snout into his sleeve.

“Your pig is hungry.”

“This week’s lesson is in Patience.” Yixing picked Ann up and cradled her in his arms. He nuzzled the thin fur on her naked pink back. “Confucius said, ‘It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.’”

“She’s going to eat your face if you don’t feed her,” Kris said.

“Lu Ann is a vegetarian,” Yixing reminded him. As if in protest Ann let out a squeal and jumped onto the desk and then out of the screen. Yixing looked momentarily distraught before turning back to the webcam.

“Don’t hit on her if you want to live. By the way, did you meet Zitao yet?”

 

-

 

Dinner wasn’t a huge affair. “We’ve been meaning to get rid of these chive dumplings for months now. Oh, we kept them in the freezer, don’t worry. They’re not molding or anything like that. Zitao had a, a _mammoth_ craving a few months ago and folded hundreds of them. Hundreds. We had to give some to the neighbors, though I have a feeling they don’t like us very much. We bought out all the leeks at the market. But look,” and she gestured into her pan, “Guess who’s stuck slaving over the stove while he goes out with his friends?”

Orfila was a bright-eyed chatterbox by nature. At first glance Kris had thought she might have been mixed, maybe with some Eastern European blood, but now he wasn’t so sure. The closer he looked, the more Chinese he found her, in the cadences of her voice, her physical mannerisms. 

It could have been the dyed brown hair, which she wore up in a fashionable bun and left a few loose pieces curling at the neck. They danced up whenever the fan blew in this direction. Kris realized he was hovering, and made an effort to move.

“Do you need any help?”

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” she yelled over the whir of the range hood. “Actually—could you set the table? Just two—he called earlier to say he’d be late tonight. Don’t forget, I also made oxtail soup.”

Their relationship was curious, Kris thought as he grabbed two bowls, two soup spoons, and two pairs of chopsticks in one hand. It was probably too early to ask. He didn’t want to intrude. One of the bowls almost slipped, but he caught it with his index finger.

Later, Orfila stared at the assortment of bottles that newly adorned the bathroom sink as Kris scrambled to make them less conspicuous, hiding his eye creams behind the larger full-body lotion. “Wow,” she said, in English. “That’s—“

“I dated a Korean girl for five years,” Kris explained.

“Oh.” Orfila shifted her attention away from the jar of Snowise Whitening Cream to him instead. She really did have very beautiful, penetrating eyes.

“You’re one of those guys.”

“I’m not—“ Kris started as a reflex but caught himself because—well, it might have been true. He wasn’t sure that he wasn’t one of those guys.

“I’m just kidding. I had a thing for Bae Yongjun, too, back when I was in college.”

“That was, what, last year?” Kris couldn’t resist saying.

Orfila laughed, not bothering to mask her delight. Her hair was down now, and she had removed all of her makeup, but Kris didn’t mind the eye circles or sun freckles dotting her nose, sprinkled across her cheeks. In another life, steered by a surer pair of hands, ones that dared to make fearless promises to strange women he’d just met, he might have found her irresistible.

“Zhang Yixing warned me about you,” she said. “I didn’t think he was being serious.”

 

-

 

He honestly had thought he would be buried in San Francisco.

In the winter her face puffed out again, and she would spend mornings agonizing over the extra unwanted roundness, barely detectable in the beginning until he spent enough time to see her the way she saw herself. It didn’t mean he loved her any less, he argued when she seemed affronted by his silent acquiescence. If anything, it should’ve meant the _opposite_. He was always almost-saying important things in a roundabout way.

“I really thought that if you spent most of your childhood and early adulthood hungry there would be a payoff later, you know? I guess God works in mysterious ways.”

Later he would miss her strange sense of humor, not being able to tell how serious she was. She invoked the lord’s name only on holidays and in front of people she wanted to impress, like their neighbors across the hall with the stroller a permanent folded fixture against their door. They didn’t have children. The wife wore a veiled pillbox hat to church every Sunday, and Jessica took exceptional care in writing out their Christmas cards, struggling with her long-lost cursive.

“We’re good people, too.” 

Jess pressed her tongue against the envelope adhesive, a western practice Kris had always found borderline repulsive.

“Let’s repent for our sins,” he drawled, wrapping himself around her tiny, brittle waist. He rested his chin on the top of her head and took in the scent of her signature Dior perfume. Memories like this were why some days he still wondered why he didn’t marry her.

The months after he left his job they grew a chasm in the apartment. Watered it as if it were their own, with diligence. She was still in the office until late every night, while Kris suddenly had the entire day to make dinner. He became curious and nostalgic, like years of avoiding people he loved had finally caught up to him. He stalked his old friends online, backtracked through their Weibos, found Instagram accounts through emails accumulated in his personal Gmail, unread over the years. He even discovered Yixing on Renren, although the last post on his wall had been over a year ago. 

Jess stopped talking to him. He stopped brainstorming creative answers to “How was your day?” He wasn’t taking up hobbies, just lurking on Skype all the time. She started going out on Friday nights again, in shoes that took Kris longer than a beat to not recognize. “Are those—“

“I got them on sale at DSW last week.”

“They look good, babe.” 

Before he could stand up to hug her, she had already slipped out the door. Her heels clicked down the hallway and he found himself listening until he couldn’t hear them anymore.

Money wasn’t the issue, he told himself. She wasn’t like that. Besides, she made enough for the both of them and whatever children they could’ve had. But they weren’t going to have children now, or ever. He’d ruined it. He’d done something. He thought of ringing up his old manager, of possibly groveling and asking to be taken back. Maybe they wouldn’t even require him to grovel. Maybe they’d kept his cube open in an sincere display of optimism.

He shook his head. It was past two in the morning, Jess hadn’t come home, and he was approaching delirious. There was a reason he quit, even if he couldn’t remember it now.

They were drifting.

Another two months crawled by before they broke it off. By then he’d heard through the grapevine—a nosey childhood friend Jess had spent most of her life trusting too much and Kris had never been too keen on—that she was being courted by someone else, noncommittally, on the sly. A dentist, said the informant, tall, with, she stressed, nice teeth. The perfect, slightly horsey kind, almost like veneers, so you know he’d never embarrass you on a date with green leafy shit lodged between the cracks. And—get this, topped with a blinding Colgate smile, built for TV commercials.

“That’s enough,” Kris interrupted. “You really don’t slack off on the details.”

Taeyeon laughed into the phone, a nefarious tinkling sound. “Hey, you asked. Honestly, I didn’t think you guys would last as long as you did, knowing Sica.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was a pause, followed by a reticent “Well…” It curdled his stomach.

“Sica’s more of an explorer. Settling down with you… I’m sure your place is really nice, don’t get me wrong, but… sorry, I couldn’t see it. It’s centuries too early for that. For her. Maybe not you. Everyone moves at a different pace, so. Don’t—hey. Hello? Kris?”

In the end it was just Yixing and him, good, true friend Zhang Yixing who averted his eyes while Kris sobbed in front of his webcam and then said, “Come home, Kris. It’s gonna be okay. Come back to us.”

 

-

 

Home wasn’t Shenyang, Kris thought, as he lay freshly showered on his new bed in his new room and bore a slow arduous hole into the ceiling lamp above. The curved shade darkened with soft charcoal spots in areas which he guessed were either clusters of rolled-up dust or the carcasses of flies accumulated over the years. 

The house had quieted, with Orfila gone to bed at precisely ten o’clock. She’d heard from endless magazines and celebrity interviews that sleeping early was crucial to skin repair and rejuvenation, especially if one wished to age gracefully. “But I’m preaching to the choir, now, aren’t I? I’ll bet you even wrote some of those articles. _Wu laoshi_.” 

Kris had never needed to read a skincare article in his life, not when he was living with someone who’d handpick out the right type of lotion for his skin combination and explain to him, unprompted, the importance of regular exfoliation and not touching his face with unwashed hands. The first year they started dating Jessica had gotten him a loofah for his birthday. 

“Do you know how hard it is to find a black loofah?” She’d demanded, possibly upon seeing his blank expression. And then, a little nervously: “That’s your favorite color, right? It goes with the whole metro goth thing you’ve got going on.”

Never had he been the target of such terrifying descriptors. “No,” he said. “It’s magenta.”

She started laughing, which set the stage for worse jokes to come. Bad jokes were in fact the only kind he allowed in his repertoire; they weeded out the friends who couldn’t bear a couple seconds of uncomfortable fake-laughing, which were friends that Kris wasn’t sure he wanted. Jessica passed the litmus test while they were in that uncertain early phase still, groping around each other, reading volumes into silences. He could tell she didn’t always know exactly when he was being funny or just being himself, and as someone who’d once had his sense of humor referred to as “incomprehensibad” he decided to assure her that black was actually probably his favorite color, if he even had one at this age. It wasn’t something he’d thought much about since approximately the second grade, when they had to go around interrogating their classmates for everyone’s favorite things and practice writing them down. What was intended as a handwriting exercise caused Kris no small amount of distress. They’d just moved from Guangzhou that year, and he was still having trouble connecting his ear to his brain, his brain to his hand. “R” and “th” sounds were the worst. So of course the first kid he interviewed had to be named something fucking impossible like Thora Roth. Thora’s favorite color was green, like her eyes.

Jess nodded, smiling the whole time, and admitted when he was done that she couldn’t exactly relate. She’d lived in San Francisco all her life, except for the early childhood summers in Seoul that stretched between school years. “But I’m serious. You better use this loofah every day until you see mold. Trust me, your skin will thank me in another decade.”

That was a tough deal to reject. He held her gift to his chest and solemnly vowed that he, Kris Wu, would indeed use it every day, cross his heart and hope to die. 

It was a promise that he kept easily until the month of their breakup, and by then the raggedy sponge had deteriorated into a relic, a painful insinuation of what he had lost every time he clambered into the bathtub. He threw it out with the Wednesday trash, after Googling whether or not it was recyclable. It wasn’t. Not many things were. Kris found himself at the peak of his poeticism during the first stage of this post-breakup era.

Downstairs, the slamming of the front door jolted him from his reverie. He heard a grunt, the kicking off of boots, and a set of heavy footsteps trudging up the stairs. Whoever they belonged to might have been a little drunk, like walking without dragging their feet was proving an impossibility. The other guy who lived here, he remembered suddenly. Huang Zitao.

He listened idly to Zitao stumbling into the bathroom down the hall and, when the door closed none-too-quietly behind him, the muffled sounds of him groping around, the turning on of the shower water, allowing these mundane noises to guide himself to sleep.

 

-

 

In the morning Orfila made pancakes, excited to have an excuse to finally use up the batter they’d bought last month, when, she raised her hand to cup the side of her mouth, as if recounting a big secret, “Zitao had another one of his menstrual cravings. That boy, I swear.”

“Sounds like he’s still growing,” Kris said uncertainly. He was trying to identify the building on the other side of the community courtyard, visible through the living room balcony. 11, or was it 12? Ah-Si had mentioned a mnemonic that he used to label the buildings without having to count them every time.

“I can hear you guys, you know.”

Slipping into the chair on the other side of the table, Zitao was taller than he’d expected, and darker, dressed in a gray button-down tucked into a pair of neat black slacks with an expertly ironed crease. The way he held himself suggested years of disciplined—something. Dance lessons perhaps. The shirt pulled taut across his shoulders, just a half-size too small to be the strict definition of professional, Kris thought in Jessica’s voice, a discreet mumble she adopted while they used to people-watch in Starbucks.

Zitao flashed him a quick, squirrely half-smile, and stuck out his hand. “Huang Zitao.”

Kris extended his own, but not without banging it against the table first. “Wu Yifan,” he said through the excruciating pain.

“Kris,” corrected Orfila, scraping her uniquely shaped pancakes off the pan. Zitao raised his eyebrows. “He’s American.”

“Canadian—“ Kris said. “Sort of. But yeah, you can call me anything. I don’t mind.”

“What does Zhang Yixing call you?”

Kris had to think about it. “That depends on how mad he is.”

“Normally, then.”

“Wu Yifan, I guess. Yifan.”

“Okay,” Zitao said, tinkering his fork against the plate. “Kris,” he said, the shape of the word forcing his lips apart to show a sliver of uneven bottom teeth. “Are you going to school with, um—“ he gestured towards Kris’ hair.

Kris ran his hand through it, on instinct. “Oh. Damn. I didn’t have time to dye it before getting here.” The whole decision to pack up his life and move halfway across the globe had been made so haphazardly that the previous night he’d looked into his suitcase with amazement at having packed not only his cell phone charger but also his razor and favorite brand of chewing gum. The charger was useless now. But this was how one did recklessness, he thought—with infinite foresight.

“It’s okay,” Zitao said quickly. “Principal He is really, really great. Really laidback. And the kids will probably love it. They expect all foreigners to be blond anyway.”

Zitao’s own hair was starkly black, blacker than Kris’ early-Kangta phase as a pimply-faced teenager when his dad got that job with Samsung, right before the divorce, and the whole family relocated to Seoul. It was the kind of black that greased easily and let everyone who saw you know exactly when was the last time you’d washed your hair. Zitao had honest hair, hair that couldn’t tell a lie, and, Kris noticed as he reached across the table for the orange juice, several piercings in his ear. Small punctures in the cartilage and the lobe. He must have left the studs out for the day.

Maybe Zitao noticed him looking, because the tip of his ears flushed a soft pink, and he ducked his head before inhaling the rest of his pancakes.

He was out of the door before Kris could say goodbye.

Orfila seemed apologetic. “He’s still a touch awkward, especially with strangers. You know how teenagers get.”

“How old is he?” Kris asked.

She did the math in her head, counting on her fingers for help. “Twenty-two this year. His birthday’s coming up in a few weeks, actually.”

Three years ago Kris had just graduated, was finishing up his first year of Teach for America in Knoxville, Tennessee, had spent more nights at his desk than the bed beside it. The bed he began using as a placeholder for dirty laundry. Still he’d been bursting with unexpired youthful enthusiasm, genuinely aching to make a difference. 

“Is he working?” he wondered aloud.

Orfila rounded her mouth into an expression of surprise. “Did Yixing forget to tell you? Zitao’s a PE teacher. You’ll be working together.”

 

-

 

One couldn’t have guessed from a quick onceover that He Jiong was a multimillionaire—he came off as more like a well-kept museum curator, or a vivacious sprite. He wore a tweed suit and khaki-colored britches that stopped right above his argyle socks. Kris blinked before meeting the twinkle in Principal He’s eye.

“Mr. Wu,” said the principal, closing the door behind them. “Yixing has sung your praises well.”

Kris let out a nervous chuckle. He had the distinct sensation of going for his first job interview all over again, that first nerve-wrecking round of questions from the recruiter at Blackstone, even if most of them were behavioral and he could, in his sleep, turn each of his “three greatest weaknesses” into a tentative strength.

“Please sit,” said Principal He, sitting back himself.

Kris sat.

He watched Principal He’s steepled fingers as he described the job in detail—and his expectations for Kris. “These are not ordinary kids, you know.”

Kris nodded. Yixing had told him that they’d come from lower-income families, kids who didn’t grow up with computers or tablets or whatever new gadget had become ubiquitous to the everychild’s learning experience. He’d said that He Jiong had been very clear about the type of academy he was running.

“They require special attention,” Principal He continued, with a smile that didn’t expect reciprocation. “Attention that many of their families, due to financial and timely restraints, have had difficulty providing. Some of these kids have never been exposed to English outside of a few snatches on the radio. Jolin Tsai’s ‘baby’ this or ‘ooh yeah’ that.” He searched Kris’ face carefully. “You have to promise to be patient.”

Patience meant time, and the willingness to give it, to spend it with blind faith, eyes closed, trustingly. For once he didn’t associate it with languishing. Time was something he could afford—had waited a long time to afford. Confucius said, he thought, and bit back a laugh. 

“I promise, sir,” he said.

Principal He looked pleased. “Good! Let’s meet your students now, shall we?”

 

-

 

Everyone asked about his hair, but no one seemed to care about the answer, they were too busy staring. Which was convenient, because he didn’t know how _I was depressed for six months and thought dyeing my hair to look like a Japanese motorcycle gang member would make me happy again_ would hold up with thirteen-year-olds. Or _That visit to the hairdresser was the highlight of my half-year heartbreak hibernation._ He wasn’t planning on teaching them sarcasm or alliteration for a long while.

He had an open hour between two and three in the afternoon, and one of his new coworkers, a long-limbed transplant from Wuhan, showed him around the school. Zhou Mi was the only other teacher who gave him more than a clipped self-introduction. He asked, “No, where are you _really_ from?” and “You’re not actually twenty-five?” and “Have you ever tried henna?” 

Kris guessed it was the height. The height scared off a lot of people, always made him look meaner than he was. 

“Here we have the grand gymnasium, pride of He Jiong’s Special Academy,” Zhou Mi was saying. They’d stopped at the bottom of a stairwell before a pair of swinging doors, and Kris placed his head in the rounded window, resting his chin on the curved rim.

It was smaller than could be called modest, roughly the size of three classrooms put together, with low ceilings and dull scratched up linoleum floorboards. The basketball hoops seemed to hang lower than the standard ones he’d find on a street court back home. Kris was seized by a momentary flashback from many years ago, the anticipation of his entire school steaming off the bleachers as someone, maybe coach, shouted at him, “Orange. _Orange_ ” with three seconds left on the clock. _Shoot_ , he was saying, shoot, even though Kris wasn’t a shooter. Kris had a 50/50 chance of missing a free throw. The whole team groaned whenever he got fouled. Ugh, Jongdae would say from the bench, right before Kris shot him a death glare. Jongdae, who barely grazed Kris’ elbow, shot better free throws.

“And there’s one of our best teaching assistants, Huang Zitao,” Zhou Mi said cheerfully, mistaking Kris’ silence for something else. He squinted into the other window. “You can see how diligent he is, polishing up the basketballs for the next class to use, even though he teaches gymnastics. A very flexible lad. Wait ‘til you see his splits.”

Zitao was crouched over the ball rack with something in his hand, a rag cloth, and from where Kris stood he could’ve passed for a well-behaved student monitor, designated with cleaning duty. He couldn’t imagine the guy leading a stretching exercise, never mind commanding the attention of twenty students at once.

“C’mon,” Zhou Mi said, gesturing towards the next flight of stairs. “The best is yet to come. You see, there’s a _secret_ teacher’s lounge for the _elite_ instructors. Eons too early for you, sorry to say, but I like to give the newcomers something to look forward to…” 

 

-

 

Yixing was reaching the turning point in his career where he no longer had a functional relationship with sleep. Sleep was the nagging mother-in-law, the accessory in his exciting music-producing lifestyle. Kris realized that now that they were in the same time zone the hours they caught each other on Skype seemed much stranger than back when he was still on Pacific time. He’d never bothered to do the math back then. Now when he signed on at 4 a.m. to find the small green icon next to “zyxwvu91” he knew for a fact it was time that Yixing should’ve been using for skin repair. At least Kris had the jetlag to blame.

“Talk to me, Kris. Wu Yifan. Talk to me before I lose my mind.” 

Kris surfed away from the NYT Sports section, dragged the Skype image of Yixing back into view. He came across a lot more low-resolution now that he’d turned off all the lights. His face was blue.

“I’m here.”

“I know you’re there,” Yixing said morbidly, “but are you really _there_?”

Kris laughed. “What?”

"Isn't it weird to think—...never mind."

"Think what?"

"I was gonna say, isn't it weird to think at one point we didn't know each other?" Yixing leaned back in his chair, facing away from the camera. Kris heard the faint clicking of something in the background, like a stapler. "Think about it. At one point in our lives, I didn't know how bad you were at, like, being honest. _At one point in our lives_ , I didn’t know exactly how much product you used in your hair every morning—"

"Wait," Kris interrupted. "Go back."

"Which part?"

"What are you talking about, 'being honest'?"

"Oh. It's just — it's nothing. But you're just not...”

“I’m not what?” 

Yixing took a breath, as if weighing his options. “You're not good at looking at yourself,” he said finally. “I know you do it all the time, checking yourself out in store windows and reflective surfaces, but when it comes to introspective soulgazing shit, you back the fuck away like someone burned you… in another lifetime or something." He continued in a gentler tone. "It's not _bad_ to think sometimes. Like, try to figure your own shit out. Trust me, I've been there."

Kris knew he had. Yixing, who draped his own human complexity all over his face.

"I'm not as deep as you think I am," Kris said, attempting a dry laugh. "I really don't have that much going on in here."

"Whatever you say, man." 

Yixing had migrated away from the computer. Probably in the bathroom. Kris could hear the water running. 

"So what's up with this Huang Zitao kid anyway? How'd he end up here?"

There was a pause, where the water stopped running and Kris imagined Yixing was toweling his hands dry. His voice was louder when he spoke again. "Zitao? Orfila took him in a few years ago, I think they were both lonely. I know she was."

"They had a — thing, then?"

"What—no, no. No. Actually... no. I doubt it.” Yixing poked his head back into the frame. A toothbrush dangled from his lips, toothpaste foaming between them. “They're practically siblings by this point. He's been mostly single but I know she's had guys on and off. She thinks of him as more of...an abandoned cat, I bet."

"I bet," Kris echoed. Zitao as a lost kitten, left on the side of the road. Scowling and licking his wounds dry. It wasn't too hard to imagine.

 

-

 

They spent the weekend building the cake. Building, because “baking doesn’t express the blood, sweat and tears that went into this labor of love,” Orfila explained, brushing aside a piece of wayward hair with the back of her arm. She was wearing gloves, and some of the frosting had gotten on her bangs. Kris would’ve picked it off if his own hands hadn’t been sticky with the cake batter residue.

“If he asks, this was store-bought,” she reminded him. “You have no idea how big of a crybaby he used to be. Nowadays he pretends to be cool, but he used to love my cakes. Now he’s always, ‘don’t bother, Wu Xin.’ What if I want to bother? What if I know you secretly want it too?”

They waited until just past eleven, Kris pretending to be absorbed in the soccer game on TV while Orfila painted her toenails in front of her laptop, perusing the news while keeping one eye on the clock. Zitao didn’t show up at ten-thirty, and then he didn’t show at eleven-fifteen, and then Orfila announced, with a wistful note of resignation, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight. Tell that boy happy birthday if you see him in the next hour.”

Kris took out the garbage at half-past eleven, and spied, across the garden, a familiar silhouette leaning against building 12, lit up against the backdrop of patio paver lights. 

“Happy birthday,” he said when he was within speaking distance. Zitao raised his head, and Kris saw the metallic shine of the earbuds in his ears. He wore the expression of someone who’d been caught doing something illegal, eyes a little wide, mouth ajar, and quickly tried to adjust back to neutrality, but not before Kris had seen it, processed his guilt.

“I didn’t want her to make a big deal out of it,” Zitao preempted with a shrug, and then scrummaged for something from his back pocket. His hand emerged with an open pack of cigarettes, which he nudged toward Kris, who shook his head. With another shrug Zitao shook the carton until a cigarette popped out. He held it between his lips and found a lighter in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, cupped around it while clicking the metal switch. Once, twice; nothing came out. Kris heard him mumble a curse, low at first and then again, louder. _Ta ma de_. He clicked again, and eventually Kris got tired of watching.

“Lemme,” he said, reaching over. A small flame sprung from the lighter, curling into early wisps of smoke as it made contact with the butt of the stick. “Thanks,” Zitao said, his nose inches away from Kris’ face. “Er.”

Kris stepped back abruptly, cleared his throat. “I think Orfila likes making a big deal out of you. She thinks of you as family.”

“Orfila?” Zitao stopped his fingers. “Is that what you call her?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I got used to it. It’s how she signed her emails to me back before I got here.”

“Yeah, she likes whipping out little English phrases sometimes. I swear I’ve never heard anyone call her by her English name. It’s a joke.” Zitao paused, shooting a sidelong glance at Kris. “I mean, it’s fine if you do it. I’m sure she gets a kick out of it.”

Kris dug his hands deeper into his pockets. It was hard to tell if Zitao secretly hated him.

“It’s not even my birthday,” Zitao continued.

“What?”

They’d gotten his birthdate wrong at the hospital, Zitao explained, even though “May” looked nothing like “September.” Growing up everyone around him agreed he had the character of an autumn baby, if not dead-of-winter baby. His uncle joked that he should’ve been born in a blizzard, a dark blemish in the snow, a child of ice. “I guess I was a prickly teenager,” Zitao said.

“You’re alright,” Kris said when he was finished, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Zitao barked out a short laugh, releasing a puff of smoke. “You don’t even know me. I mean, we just met.”

“Yeah, well. I’m sure you’re a decent kid.”

“Kid,” Zitao repeated. “That’s rich. You’re, what, twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-five,” Kris said. Why the fuck did everyone always guess older? “And _sorry_. You just have this aura of like, youth. It’s not a bad thing.”

Zitao fell silent, and Kris wondered if this was a hint for him to leave. The conversation wasn’t supposed to go this way.

"You know, a lot of people don't love what they do,” said Zitao, suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

Zitao took a slow, languid drag and exhaled with too much control to be unpracticed. His smoking habits must have accrued gradually over the years. Like small tokens of wisdom, Kris mused silently. Like an aging biker’s increasingly eccentric tattoos.

“Do you really want to be a teacher?”

The question was a loaded gun, but Kris had supplied the bullets. He thought back to those two long years in Knoxville, to yelling into a sea of blank, apathetic faces. He’d moved there with so many plans, ideas to help reform the education system, and for the first few months had entered the classroom every morning with the kind of buoyancy unique to certain privileged recent college grads, the same sort of naïve confidence he recognized in the other teachers his age. The next two years depleted him of everything he’d ever believed in. You couldn’t revise the system bottom-up when the top was rotting, he knew now. The system needed more than a trim. It needed a fucking upheaval, to be turned upside-down, change shaken out of its pockets. And the men in suits, the ones who sat back in their armchairs and signed off papers and smoked each other’s imaginary masturbatory Cuban cigars, needed sense throttled into them, but there was no one to do it. He sure as hell couldn’t do it.

The force of his residual bitterness surprised even himself. He struggled to regain footing before replying. “I don’t know. Do you?”

The deflection was expertly dodged. "What did you want to be as a kid?" Zitao pressed on.

What Kris wanted to be as a kid was a whole other story. 

He remembered two things from fifth grade: angry rounds of Pokemon on the school bus and Britney Spears’ perfect oval-shaped belly button. The first time that music video aired on MTV he and his buddies had gathered around the television like they were holding some kind of ritual. They were learning not to give a shit about listening to pop music as long as the girl was hot. At the halfway mark Henry had ejaculated in his overalls. The rest of the year they substituted his name for “pee.” “I gotta go Henry real bad.” “If I don’t Henry now I might explode.”

"Eminem, maybe,” Kris said. “Hey. It's not that funny." 

Zitao was laughing so hard he was crying. His shoulders pulled up and down as if he were convulsing. Kris moved to shake them, to make him stop, but upon first contact Zitao drew back with a sharpness that left him stunned, almost hurt. His head made a sharp cracking sound against the wall where he'd backed into it. 

"I didn't mean—" but he didn’t know what he was supposed to be apologizing for. "Sorry," he said anyway, and took a small step back.

Zitao licked his lower lip from where he'd bit into it. A thin sliver of blood slid from the cracked skin. He rubbed his shoulder, and the look on his face was strange, undeniably sad for a moment, then just as quickly blanking out. 

"I don’t like being touched.” He lowered his head and didn't look at Kris when he put the cigarette to his lips again.

"Oh," Kris said. He nestled his hands in the scabs of lint filling his pockets. "To be honest, I'm not great at physical contact either."

"Really?” Zitao didn’t bother to hide the incredulousness in his voice. “I would’ve taken you for a hugger, with those elephant trunk arms."

"Me? Hell no. I hold on for two seconds max and then get the fuck out of there."

"What about sex?"

Kris looked over sharply and saw a different version of Zitao, trying distinctly not to laugh. Something inside him relaxed, like a knot coming loose. "That's different," Kris said, caving in to the laughter himself. "All day and all night, baby. As long as you like."

 

-

 

“Did you play basketball? I played too. Mostly I just let them bounce off me before they bounced off the other person and then out of bounds because--” Zhou Mi slammed his fist on the table, all the while maintaining a complacent smile, “—our possession again.” Kris was beginning to suspect that the only thing he and Zhou Mi had in common was being able to see above the heads of most people on the street.

“But they’re looking for a coach for Team Gold this year’s Spirit Day and I can’t do it because I’m technically ‘injured,’” and here he paused to regard the word with disdain, “in a way that would handicap my team.” He gave Kris a meaningful look.

“You’re injured?”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it. Just years of yelling at tiny tots have finally caught up to me.”

“What?”

Zhou Mi was smiling still. It was like his face had been stuck on the “generically pleasant” dial since birth. 

“I’ve lost capability of one of my vocal cords. Oh no, stop. Don’t look at me like that. I’m talking fine right now, aren’t I? I just can’t yell or go to KTV—I mean, I can go to KTV and rattle the tambourine and still have a great time. That’s fine. I just can’t yell out calls and game plans and that’s going to be necessary for Spirit Day. But otherwise I am totally okay. This is me, completely able to project my voice over a small distance.”

“Over a small distance,” Kris repeated. “How did it happen?”

Zhou Mi wagged his finger. “Let’s talk about you coaching this poor coachless basketball team.”

Zhou Mi was a social philanthropist, pushing Kris into the spotlight where he didn’t want it. But he meant well. “I’ll do it,” Kris said. “Wait, what do I have to do?”

 

-

 

Yixing had mentioned Orfila’s name when detailing out the job in Shenyang because she was in the habit of taking in strays, “not,” he amended quickly, “to say that you’re lost or anything like that.”

“You can say that. It’s okay,” Kris said.

“No.” Yixing was sticking to his story. “I mean, her place is just really cozy and relaxed, and she doesn’t ask too many questions. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable with you moving to China friendless and alone.” 

“Don’t want my blood on your hands, huh?”

“Your mom would murder me,” Yixing had reminded him. “My blood would be on _her_ hands.” Once in middle school he’d come over for video games and Kris, after forfeiting the third round, finally lost it altogether and threw his console at the wall, except it hit his mother’s favorite vase in the process, toppling onto the floor and smashing into a million bits. In a panic they’d swept up the broken shards and dumped them in a trash can a few blocks away, believing that distance would cover up the crime, but it was still the first thing Mama Wu noticed when she got home, her eyeballs bulging and her voice reaching unprecedented decibels. She chased Kris around the house with a plastic slipper until he pleaded guilty, at which point the ridged end of the slipper came down on his naked bottom three brutal times—a spectacle of motherly rage Yixing witnessed while trying to disappear quietly and unobtrusively into a corner of the room. In retrospect this incident had without a doubt brought the two boys closer together, as Yixing now knew the tallest and most handsome boy in school, with his ramrod spine and growing collection of love confessions every spring, still submitted to spankings by his mother. He’d even seen the twin Mongolian spots on his best friend’s butt cheeks, and the unique fact that Kris hadn’t even outgrown those baby blue bruises paved the way for a friendship between equals. Yixing had blackmail material now. Kris had no choice but to be friends with him forever.

“Don’t bring my mom into this,” Kris had said in his most convincing imitation of Chow Yun Fat.

If Yixing had mentioned Zitao, it was only in passing. Orfila was another mentee of He Jiong’s and an older sister figure to Yixing, but Zitao was just a kid she’d known—Yixing called him “the other resident,” not bothering to name him until Kris asked.

It made sense now. Zitao was rarely home before Kris, and most nights he stumbled into the apartment long after Orfila had gone to sleep, groping around the kitchen loudly enough that Kris could hear him over his headphones. The times Kris had brought it up with Orfila, casually slipping it into a conversation over breakfast, she’d waved her hand and chalked it up to his “rebellious teenage phase,” saying that he liked to stay out late with some of his old high school buddies, probably trying to pick up girls at a bar downtown and failing. Failing, Kris knew, because Zitao came home late for a weekday but not late enough that anything interesting could’ve happened beforehand, nothing beyond a quickie in the bathroom of whatever seedy bar he’d been hanging out in, but even then Zitao didn’t seem like the type. Kris couldn’t imagine him turning on the charm, feeding a girl drinks and lazy line after line until she felt loose and bold enough to offer to blow him or something, whether he’d planted the idea or it’d sparked autonomously in the back of her own mind from the moment she’d seen him come in the door with his group of friends, run her eyes down the general idea of chiseled shoulders and bulging biceps under his button-down, maybe checked out his ass right as he turned to sit down on the stool by the bar. Zitao had a striking, if not exactly universally good-looking face, but his jawline was as sharp as a switchblade, and he looked like he worked out more than Kris. And he was tall, which girls always appreciated. Kris couldn’t imagine him having a tough time with the female crowd but there was a general darker aura about him, almost a visible stormcloud hanging over his head. Whatever problem he had probably wasn’t physical.

Despite working at the same school, Kris rarely saw his housemate, in or out of the apartment.

But he heard him. The walls were as thin as Kris had predicted and some nights he lay in bed willing himself to fall asleep and his body, in its stubborn betrayal, would refuse, continue its stiff vigilance while in the next room began a low rumble of words, like a conversation but with steadier rhythm and he’d realize Zitao was listening to some song, probably with his headphones in, and rapping along. Maybe he thought, seeing the light off, that Kris was already asleep, or maybe he didn’t think anything. Maybe Kris—the new lodger, this nobody foreigner—wasn’t even a blip on his radar. The last thing he’d concern himself with after an eventful night out with friends. 

Zitao had okay flow. By now Kris was too embittered by the insomnia and his own pessimistic daydreams to be impressed but he found that he didn’t mind listening to Zitao spitting out the verses to Chinese songs he didn’t recognize, that, if he were being honest, the rise and fall of Zitao’s intonations stirred something in him he thought he’d forgotten long ago.

 

-

 

Zhou Mi, it turned out, had already drawn out diagrams of their game plan and outlined all of Kris’ coachly duties. “Don’t forget, ‘rubber duck’ means pick and roll. And I’m thinking we might have to flagrant foul their point guard—“

“I thought this was a game,” Kris said. “And that Spirit Day was about having fun and bringing people together.”

“Of course,” Zhou Mi said. “But Spirit Day is also about crushing your opponent’s Spirit. We need to crush Team Red’s collective spirit, show them our kids are boss.”

“So… what you really wanted when you recruited me was a figurehead. For your voice.”

“I knew I picked the right guy,” Zhou Mi said, clasping a firm hand on Kris’ shoulder before turning back to the kids on the court and blowing on his whistle to signal the beginning of their next drill.

The school was bustling for the next two weeks, frenetic with anticipation. Students painted emblems of the different clubs onto banners and lay them outside the classrooms to dry. The smell of acrylic haunted the hallways into afterschool hours. From the windows of the cafeteria Kris saw Zitao leading a marching exercise in the courtyard, moving his arms in a straight line up and down as they walked the perimeter of the barbed wire fence.

“Is he like this at home?” Zhou Mi set his tray down on the table. He was nodding toward Zitao. Kris didn’t know how Zhou Mi knew they lived together. Word must have traveled fast.

“Like what?”

“Mysterious, I want to say, but that’s not it. Bridled? Like a well-kept pony.”

Kris gulped down a mouthful of rice and shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not at home that much.”

“Really?” Zhou Mi’s hand paused on his cup as he studied Zitao’s figure in the distance. “He doesn’t ever come out with us, so we all assumed he was just a loner. Frankly, I’m surprised to hear that.” 

“We” referred to the faculty, Zhou Mi went on, who made a point of making monthly outings where gossip would be divulged—Yilin had revealed at the last one that she was pregnant with her second child, a privilege she and her husband earned on account of being both only children themselves. _But_ , Zhou Mi complained, she didn’t believe in sharing the baby's gender, in the same way that she’d kept her son's a secret as well, up until Haitao saw photos on her Weibo and—still not being able to tell; all babies seemed ambiguously sexed out of the womb—read the captions of his name underneath. Everyone knew she was hoping for a girl this time, a daughter she could spoil with her home cooking and, later, closet of vintage dresses and pantsuits. “Pantsuits,” Zhou Mi repeated dubiously, raising his eyebrows. “I guess you never know what’ll be in style by the time her daughter becomes old enough to pull a Lourdes on her.”

“A what?” 

“Madonna’s daughter, also known to raid her mother’s closet for vintage gems.”

Kris made a sound in his throat to signify that he understood. Hearing Zhou Mi talk about their colleagues made them sound like nice people, although they hadn’t reached out to him. Maybe it was his fault for not having reached out to them. Normally, he realized, he didn’t have to. In his twenty-five years of life, for the most part, people had gravitated toward him, wanting to be his friend, some even content to walk in his shadow. Kris didn’t often think about it, but he’d had groupies in high school and fell effortlessly into several non-overlapping social circles in college. He rarely was able to remember how he’d met someone because more often than not, they’d met him first. He forgot names the second after shaking someone’s hand; it wasn’t until the two-year TFA stint that he brute-forced the art of putting a title to a face—thirty of them, small and round and pointy and freckled.

Zhou Mi sipped at his tea. “Come to the next one. We’re thinking of going out for drinks after Spirit Day, which ends around five.”

Kris said he was looking forward to it, and he meant it. He needed a reason to get out of the apartment, forge relationships with his new coworkers, massage some blood into his legs again, maybe allow himself to become attached to something that wasn’t his laptop.

 

-

 

The apartment was empty when he got back. Orfila DJed weekday afternoons, on a station that played contemporary pop songs with the occasional older ballads, some quivering Jacky or tremulous Andy for the 5 PM nostalgic housewives. Orfila slipped in a Korean song every now and then when she thought she could get away with it. “K-pop’s a gray area,” Orfila had explained. “Not everyone wants to listen to music they can’t understand the lyrics to.” Kris personally had not paid attention to song lyrics since his sophomore year of high school, when he’d almost made Yunho a mix CD. It was one of those things, a weird hatchling crush, steeped completely in admiration. Half the team had fallen for Yunho, his unselfish plays on the court and insistence on treating the junior players to meals off the court. His far-reaching magnanimity was the biggest trademark of his personality, but Kris remembered him most for the way he never acknowledged Kris’ foreignness, as if it didn’t register or he didn’t care enough to address it. Either one was alright with him. Yunho had said to him his freshman year, “You’re a shoo-in for captain someday,” back when he still suffered from a careless dribble and the symptoms of a sudden growth spurt, which included a change in depth perception, not being able to recognize how far your own limbs extended. Not being able to control them even when you did. But Yunho had looked at him like he could see something Kris couldn’t, and it was like being given an invisible set of wings, something that promised of greatness in spite of your present inadequacy. Someone amazing had faith in him. How could he himself then not?

Yixing had made the mistake of demonstrating the first week Kris arrived how to bypass the Great Firewall. Kris dicked around for half an hour before signing into Facebook, navigating to the familiar photo of Jess posing against an ivy-laden brownstone, a shoot one of her NYU friends had coaxed her into the winter she’d visited him in Manhattan for a week. She was looking down at her boots and even if most of her face wasn’t visible you could tell she was smiling. Her squad of platonic male friends had come with the territory, in the way that beautiful girls were almost never alone. He’d gone the willfully oblivious route; he really didn’t care, as long as she was his. Jessica was the one who picked their fights, and even then it’d been done sparingly, and with all the trappings of a staged performance, like they needed to convince each other that this, too, was a staple of a healthy relationship. The pushing and pulling, the glorified makeup sex. This was how people grew. Jessica was a Rihanna fan. A lack of conflict was always a greater concern. “You talk to that girl more than you talk to me,” she’d said about Amber, after one of their monthly skype sessions. Amber was still in Taiwan, dating this dead ringer for Yoko Ono. She’d posted on Instagram a photo of their latest purchase: matching bikes, orange and black, captioned with “our new babies!”

“Really?” Kris stared. “Are you actually—“

And she’d said, “No,” grinning, leaning in to gently lick into his mouth, splaying a hand over his chest. They were an awful pair of performers, he’d thought, kissing her back.

He was half-hard by the time he scrolled to a photo of her with the new boyfriend. He saw what Taeyeon was saying about the guy’s teeth. Taecyeon Ok worked as an IT consultant at Verizon, had been for three years now. Facebook told him he and Jessica Jung met in September 2012, a year after Kris had gotten the nerve to ask her out and then, later, for it to be exclusive. So they’d already been friends for four years before—the opportunity arose. Maybe patience was one of Taecyeon’s strengths.

He tabbed out of the page, opened up a bootlegged DVD rip of a video Henry had sent him a couple months back, in the thick of his depression. _Cheer up man_. It was an amateur porno, a threesome shot in someone’s dorm room. A Georgetown poster hung in the back, next to a stack of baseball caps, shot glasses lined up on a wooden panel. The whole thing had a weird homey quality that Kris appreciated, which was probably why Henry had sent it to him.

He lay back in his chair and jerked himself lazily until completion. It’d been a while and he didn’t take long. He wiped off with a tissue, fell asleep and didn’t wake up until dinnertime.

 

-

 

“I’m going for it,” said Wenjia, the most ambitious kid on the Team Gold. Zhou Mi flipflopped between loving and hating her because she was about as volatile with the ball as Carmelo Anthony was with his public image. They prayed she wouldn’t be their fourth quarter Lebron. 

They were done by two points, with eleven seconds on the clock.

“Are you sure,” Kris enunciated slowly. “We could drive to the basket and aim for winning in overtime.”

“No,” Wenjia said, impatiently. “No overtime. I have badminton after this.” Badminton started at 3 PM, and it was already 2:47. 

“Okay,” said Zhou Mi, who had been sitting on the bench gripping his head in his hands for the past five minutes, since Jin on Team Red lobbed the pretty alley-oop to the other kid who was about a head taller than Zhou Mi himself. “What a monster,” Zhou Mi had cried into Kris’ shoulder.

“Okay,” he said again, with an unmistakable glint in his eye. “Bring home the gold, baby.”

Wenjia rolled her eyes into the back of her head, but she nodded and squared her shoulders. Held the ball in the crook of her elbow against her side while waiting for the clock to start again.

She passed the ball to Guan Xin, who passed it back. They had the monster kid up against her; it was going to be tough finding an opening. Kris bit down on a knuckle. Wenjia drove left, monster boy followed. Seven seconds. Zhou Mi’s hyperventilating was about as subtle as a Shakespearean tragedy. 

She passed it to Xujun, who made to shoot—the posing worked, as monster kid temporarily ditched his post to double-team the sole boy on Gold. Xujun threw the ball back to Wenjia, and she jumped, her feet just centimeters behind the line. Her ponytail swished.

The ball hit the rim and then, impossibly, rolled in.

“Just a game my _ass_ ,” Zhou Mi was shrieking and hugging Kris, and then everyone was hugging them, and even Wenjia looked briefly emotional as she pulled her badminton uniform over the gold jersey. It didn’t make sense but Kris was tearing up, crying a little as he pulled the kids closer to him, whispered in Zhou Mi’s ear that he wasn’t supposed to be yelling, that that was the whole point of Kris even being there.

 

-

 

Yilin pointed an accusing finger in Kris’ face. “We thought you thought you were too good for us.” She was leaning on Haitao, and one of her eyes kept winking shut of its own accord. One sip of Qingdao beer was all it took. “You are pregnant,” Zhou Mi had hissed, moving the bottle to the far corner of the table, which Kris used to refill everyone’s glasses. This much he remembered. He was the youngest, after all.

“One sip,” she’d whined, in a girlish affectation that made everyone laugh.

Kris’ hand stopped now over Liu Chao’s glass. “I—I don’t think that.”

“She thought you’d turn out to be another Taozi,” said Liu Chao, who taught math. He was probably the youngest after Kris and Zitao, but he spoke to the other faculty with a level of familiarity that made him appear more mature. He draped an arm around Zhou Mi’s chair. They looked as close as brothers.

“I would’ve given him _everything_ , but that child—why has he forsaken me?” Yilin wailed into her cup, which Zhou Mi had switched for 7-Up while she wasn’t looking.

“Yilin was a theater geek back in her university days,” Haitao whispered in Kris’ ear.

“You tried, darling. We were there,” Zhou Mi told her soothingly, placing a hand over hers.

“She really took to Zitao when he first got here," Haitao continued. "Wanted to be his mentor, take him under her wing. But that kid… maybe he was shy, but he never really warmed up to her."

“He’s probably afraid of women,” Liu Chao snickered.

“I’m not just any woman!” Yilin said. “I am the mother of a—a _boy_. I know how to deal with—with—“

Her head fell with a clunk onto Haitao’s shoulder.

“I think she’s just nervous about when her son grows into an adolescent and she’ll have to deal with her own Taozi,” Liu Chao said.

“He’s an adult,” Kris said, and everyone looked at him. Liu Chao held his gaze for a fraction of a second, one that intoned clearly, _In the same way as you_ , but then it was over, and Zhou Mi was saying, “Alright, let’s get this one home,” swathing Yilin’s fur coat over her shoulders.

 

-

 

The snow came suddenly, as an early morning materialization when Kris parted the curtains to his window and found everything an indiscriminate, glaring white. Outside cars were about to be buried, already entrenched up to the door handles. In a few hours children would slide down windshields, converting the blocked streets into their personal playground. 

“I’m too old for this weather,” Orfila lamented, and a scraggly-haired, flannel-clad Zitao grabbing a plate of eggs and glass of juice en route to his bedroom agreed. “Yeah, you are.” 

“You see?” She said to Kris, and made to chase him down the hallway with a butter knife. Zitao’s high-pitched giggle briefly filled the apartment.

Schools were closed for a week. Kris worked on his lesson plans, grew bored, and then worked some more. Yixing was having a hell week, too busy for Skype. He finally wrote back his mother, who’d revealed in her last email that she was attending church on the regular for the first time since he started working after graduation. She’d taken his resignation better than expected, swapping in the angry sermons he remembered from childhood for express-mailed care packages, and at the time he’d thought maybe she knew that her worrying would’ve been more worrisome to him. After a certain age the roles were reversed. Kris was supposed to be looking out for his _lao ma_ now, making sure she was treating her heart okay, taking her meds, not sleeping too late. Instead he’d hauled ass to a foreign city on the other side of the world, the furthest they’d been away from each other in two decades.

“I’m doing really well,” he wrote. “Everyone’s been extremely kind and it’s nice to see snow again.”

On the third day the heat went out. Around ten-thirty a chill began to seep into the bedroom, curling his toes under the blanket. The laptop was warming his thighs above it; he’d taken to working in bed all day, not bothering to change out of his sweats and long-sleeved university t-shirt. He waited fifteen minutes, put on his coat. Then took it off, pulled over a sweater, and put it back on. He wondered where they kept the extra comforters, if there were any. Orfila was long asleep by now. 

The light under Zitao’s door was on. He rapped his knuckle against the door, pulling his jacket to himself with the other hand.

“Hey.” Zitao emerged like a slow omen from behind the door. He looked tired and sunken and his hair stood up in several directions away from his face. On his feet were panda slippers that Kris had never seen before. “What’s going on?”

“Hey,” Kris said. “Sorry to bother you, but is it cold in your—“ He didn’t get to finish the sentence—a stream of heat had suddenly coiled deliciously around his body, working its magic into his frozen extremities.

“Oh no,” Zitao said, opening the door wider. He sounded genuinely concerned. “Did the heater in that room break down again?”

This happened every year, Zitao said, looking apologetic, and was the reason for the previous tenant moving out last winter. They’d had a service technician come over several times in the past, but there was something funky about the pipes in that room, something ghostly that caused recurrent breakdowns.

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Kris joked, sitting down by the desk while Zitao leaned back in his bed. He’d also propped up his laptop on the comforter, where he was sitting cross-legged. “Now I can go to bed feeling safe and sound.”

The previous tenant was a girl. “The guys usually just stay in this room until they get it fixed,” Zitao said. “It’s not a big deal.” He looked at Kris. “You should, too.”

“Stay with you?”

“Is that a problem? I can sleep on the floor.” Zitao was already slipping out of his blankets, one foot descending over the mattress.

“No,” Kris said quickly. “I was just asking to… make sure. I mean, I could just bundle up in heavier blankets and all the other coats I brought.” The only other coat he’d brought was a light parka for jogging in the fall.

Zitao ran a hand through his hair, messing it up even more. “I don’t think we have any extras, to be honest. Wu Xin probably donated them if we did. Sorry, man. But I was serious about sleeping on the floor. I’m used to it.”

“No, no, that’s fine, I’ll take the floor—“

“I spent four months at a monastery,” Zitao said, dragging his comforter now to the floor. “No surface is too hard for my back.”

“What?” said Kris, as he got up to continue the awkward dance of polite refusal, but Zitao had already spread the comforter over the floor and was smoothing out the corners. “Four months?”

“It was like, a spiritual purification thing.” Zitao pulled down his pillow, laptop, and the rest of his blankets. “I’d gone before as a kid, one of those Shaolin temple training programs, but the second time was different.” 

He waited for Zitao to elaborate, but he didn’t. “What was it like?”

Zitao creased his forehead, thinking, as he situated himself in a comfortable position in his new nest, propping an arm up on his pillow. "Cleansing myself of dirt and impurities and all those. Human burdens." His voice tripped over "burdens," rose a little higher, and then sunk again, like he hadn't gotten used to hearing himself talk about this. Kris wondered how many people he'd ever told, if it was something he did ever tell, or a common factoid, a conversation filler reserved for strangers.

"Hm,” Kris said.

"I was trying to find peace. You know how it goes. And yeah, I’m aware of how dumb this sounds right now."

"I didn’t say that,” Kris said. “I just can't imagine going for months without meat or I don't know... living up to those expectations."

Zitao looked up at him, the intensity of the look softened by how exhausted he suddenly appeared. "It was the second most difficult thing I had to do in my life."

Zitao had this way of making people want to know, want to ask. But Kris didn’t feel right asking, not yet. At least not the obvious questions. 

“Was it worth it?” He asked instead.

The reply was a shrug, sleepy against the pillow. “Sometimes I think so. Times like this, when I have to give up my bed to a stranger…”

“I thought we were friends,” Kris said, pretending to be affronted. Zitao gave a smile, already half-asleep.

 

-

 

The repairman couldn’t come for another five days, stranded in his neighborhood the next highway exit over where the roads were blocked with ice and dark, too, thanks to trees that had fallen over the street wires. Well, can’t you fix those too, Orfila had joked into the phone and Mr. Lu had replied drily, “Lady, I repair furnaces.”

“His wife recently had a baby. I don’t know why he isn’t thrilled about someone giving him business,” Orfila said after hanging up. “Sorry, Kris. I should’ve mentioned this in the lease.”

“I just feel bad for intruding on Zitao,” Kris said. It was the third night. The sun was coming out a little, and some people were beginning to leave their apartments. From the living room window he’d seen movement in the courtyard below, the waddling shapes of heavily scarved and jacketed people emerging from their first floor entrances. 

Orfila hand-waved the concern. “Zitao’s used to it. He’s trained himself into a constitution of steel. He’s pretty much my Iron Man.” She pulled Zitao into a friendly stranglehold as the boy walked into the kitchen.

“Iron Man wears a suit,” Zitao choked out, prying her arm off his neck. “I need an armor to protect myself from you.”

Orfila let go, wrinkling her nose. “You smell disgusting. Did you brush your teeth?” 

Zitao ducked his head. He darted a quick look at Kris. “This is what a man smells like,” he said, lifting his chin.

“I’m glad I’m not a man then,” Orfila said. “But are you saying that Kris here isn’t one either? Because I don’t think he smells like something died in his mouth.”

Zitao groaned. “I literally just rolled out of bed. Give me five minutes, okay?”

Kris could testify to it. When he woke up Zitao was sprawled across the floor, mouth-breathing little snorts into his pillow. He’d stepped carefully over Zitao’s outstretched body to escape the room.

Orfila was visiting her parents, a twenty-minute walk away. She’d be gone until the next afternoon, she said, and she hoped the boys would get along in her absence. Play nice, she said.

“She’s probably paying a visit to her booty call,” Zitao said before disappearing into the bathroom.

Kris spent most of the day in the living room, avoiding the igloo that had overtaken his own room. He felt awkward in Zitao’s, and that arrangement was clearly designated for sleeping; he was thankful that Zitao had even welcomed him into his personal space. 

He was in the middle of responding to an email when his phone began vibrating in his pocket.

“You’re alive!” Zhou Mi said when he picked up. “I was afraid you’d caught pneumonia and left us already.”

Kris laughed. “How’re you holding up?”

“Bored out of my mind. I think I’ve blown several thousand RMB on online shopping in the past three days. Someone please take the computer away from me.”

Kris said he knew the feeling.

“Want to come out later? Liu Chao and I are heading downtown for drinks. We’re thinking Party 98 or Sunny, maybe do dinner first around nine? C’mon, we’ll even pick you up.”

Kris hadn’t gone out since he’d arrived, aside from a few local sightseeing trips. “I’m tempted,” he said, and added, “Can I bring Zitao?”

There was a surprised pause. “Why not? We do want to get to know the guy. Raaaaging with Huang Zitao.”

“No thanks,” Zitao said. He’d just gotten out of the shower, and his hair stuck to his scalp like a rubber swimming cap. “I have other plans.”

He ducked into his room before Kris could muster up a counter-offer.

Kris texted Zhou Mi back. _Rain check? Think I might be getting sick._

 _Boo_ , Zhou Mi wrote back.

Kris ordered in Thai food and watched the latest episode of his new favorite police drama online. When he left his room at half past ten to take a piss, he saw that Zitao’s light was still on.

“Come on in,” Zitao yelled after the third knock. 

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his headphones on, the large showy ones that went over his ears. The laptop was frozen on a page with a black background and red text. Kris vaguely made out a line of skulls marqueeing across the screen.

“What’re you up to?” Kris asked casually. 

“Nothing,” Zitao answered. “I mean, writing in my blog.”

“I thought you said you had plans.”

“These are my plans.”

“You know what I hear goes really well with writing?” Kris mimed a beer bottle, popping off the cap, putting it to his lips.

Zitao stared at him until he understood, and grinned.

 

-

 

“So when you say you’re going out with friends, what you actually mean is you’re going out to, like, a loser internet café or bar by yourself and then getting schwasted and then not coming home until you’re sure no one is asleep.”

“Schwasted?” Zitao slurred meaningfully, “is not what I said.”

“I don’t know why you felt the need to lie to her.”

“She worries too much. I don’t like it.” Zitao took another swig from his bottle, which Kris noticed was nearly empty again. _Again._

“That’s sweet, in a sad twisted way,” he said, reaching over to ruffle Zitao’s hair.

“Get off,” Zitao said, squealing like Yixing’s pig. “I said no touching, remember.”

Kris couldn’t remember. It felt so long ago, that night in the courtyard on Zitao’s fake birthday, when he couldn’t even get the stupid lighter to work.

“What about you then?” Zitao said, changing the subject. “Now that we’ve established my ‘sad, twisted’ life story.”

“Sad twisted life story is not what I said,” Kris parroted.

Zitao threw a bottle cap at his chest. “Shut up.”

Kris gaped as it bounced off his collar. “You could’ve maimed the money-maker.”

“Shut up.” Zitao kicked his leg with his bare foot. For some reason he wasn’t wearing socks. Kris barely recalled him peeling them off hours earlier, complaining that it was too hot in the house, too hot in his room, where they’d dumped the four cartons of beer.

“I’m serious. Tell me how you got into,” Zitao gestured vaguely, madly around the room, “all this.”

Kris leaned back onto his palms. Suddenly he understood what Zitao meant about the room being suffocating, like everything was closing in on them. 

“You know, the thing about teaching… English, I mean, that kind of gets me apprehensive is what these kids are going to do with it when they grow up.” Kris rubbed the back of his head. “I think back to when I was working in the States, and those times that I tutored one-on-one—it was always rich kids, you know, whose parents could afford that—private English lessons. And it always felt like they were gonna grow up to do exactly what I was doing, which is to say… not knowing what they were doing. Or doing it for non-reasons.”

Zitao made a sound of disagreement. “You’re overthinking it. There’s nothing wrong with teaching English, or wanting to learn it.”

“Yeah,” Kris said. “I know.”

“And who’s to judge the reasons people learn anything, right? I mean, maybe some people learn English to meet the love of their life. Who happens to be a tall, blond, good-looking Chinese-Canadian guy, or something.”

Kris allowed that to sink in. “So you’re saying that I’m good-looking.”

Zitao was smirking, but his lower lip had taken on a defiant sort of stiffness. “Anyone with eyes can see that. You’re a standard _shuai ge_ by any definition.”

“I don’t know, I was pretty lonely back in San Francisco those six months after we broke up.”

“‘We?’”

“My—“ he stopped just short of “girlfriend.” “—ex. Jess. Jessica. We met freshman year of university, then dated on-and-off for five years.” 

He found himself wanting to continue talking, which was surprising, because he never wanted to talk about it. It’d become that thing his friends sidestepped in conversation, the latest piece of family gossip his relatives discussed in lowered voices, snatches of which he’d overhear while stalking past the kitchen for leftover turkey the Thanksgiving after the breakup. His mother had taken to actively Americanizing herself after the move to Boston three years earlier. “What about the pretty girl? I thought they were getting married next year,” said his oldest and now least favorite aunt, her elbow propped up on the kitchen counter, and his mom, upon seeing Kris against the doorway, quickly made a shushing sound and announced that the pie was ready. “With my signature pumpkin cream filling,” she added, with an apologetic downturn smile directed at Kris, but more than anything he just felt tired—of dodging questions, unwarranted sympathy, of being trapped in this massive vessel of blood and tissue that he wore now as a costume, a draining necessity. It wasn’t like he could step out of himself for a week and then step back in to renormalize, allow the Kris-gears to shutter into place. This wasn’t him. _Kris_ had been the captain of his high school basketball team, earning the title of MVP for three consecutive semesters and one other dissociated from the three, which was not only as a freshman but as the first freshman to have ever been honored with the title. The team kept a burn book in Yunho’s old locker as a joke and the only insult scrawled on his page had been “too good-looking; needs to be punched every now and then” which he could tell was Jongdae from the chicken scratch and semicolon. Kris wasn’t someone who’d eavesdrop on other people talking about him and then pretend not to hear. He was doomed now, stuck with this cheap second-tier imitation of himself.

But Zitao’s prompting stare, the casualness of his body language which said, basically, _I have no real investment in this_ , for some reason—that made it okay. Kris could talk about the breakup, and Jess, and how much he missed her and hated himself for it.

So he talked about it.

 

-

 

“The thing is, I used to be a really cool guy. No, seriously—seriously.” Zitao was doing his laughing-til-he-cried schtick again, and Kris punched him lightly in the arm. “Hey, trust me here. In high school I got voted ‘most likely to freeze you with his ice bazooka of charisma.’”

“What the, that is a lie.”

“I swear.” Kris raised his hand and held the other over his heart. “Seriously. Feel my heartbeat.”

Zitao, still crying, fumbled a hand over Kris’ sweatshirt. “I don’t feel anything. Guess your heart’s also made of ice, or did that bazooka freeze it up too.”

“Your hand’s on the wrong side, loser. Heart’s on the left. Here, lemme.”

Zitao’s hand was cold to the touch, and a little clammy. Kris guided it to hover above where he supposed his heart actually was, and he could feel it now, more distinctly than before, each ba-dump punching his ribcage like a nail through wood.

“Whoa,” said Zitao, bravely applying pressure with his palm. “It’s actually beating pretty fast. I thought if you were telling the truth I wouldn’t be able to feel anything.”

Kris noticed he was still covering Zitao’s hand with his own. “Oh. Shit, you’re right. Why did I even say—“

“No fucking clue, man.” Sometimes Zitao’s voice hit an unbecomingly high pitch when he was excited. “Are you drunk? I feel a little drunk.”

Kris most definitely was not drunk, although they did finish maybe fifteen beers between the two of them? It was unclear at the moment. 

Uncl…ear. 

Uncle…ar. 

Uncle… ha.

“You’re the only one, kiddo,” he slurred.

“Don’t call me that,” Zitao warned, his head lolling to the side. It hit Kris’ shoulder and he went, loudly, “ _Ow_. No changing the subject—I hate when people call me that.”

“I didn’t change the subject,” Kris said, closing his eyes now. Zitao must’ve had a bigass head, as heavy as an anchor weighing him down to sea. No buoyancy whatsoever, Kris thought, recalling inexplicably physics lessons of high school yore.

“No, you did, with your inviting manly shoulder just begging me to—“

“Shut up,” Kris said, and draped an arm around Zitao, pressing him into his chest instead, which was infinitely more comfortable than having a rock on his trapezius. His traps. Traps. He needed to work on them. Probably everything had turned into fat by now. Shit. 

Zitao was shifting, squirming in his hold. “You little weasel, stop moving, you,” Kris said, eyes still closed, but peeking one open to check on the guy. Zitao had a comically stupid wide-eyed borderline-terrified look on his face, folded into himself, slightly angry, too, like the one he had when--right, Kris remembered now, which he couldn't earlier. He snorted at the memory of Zitao recoiling from him. What was so bad about being touched? Most people would be grateful that Kris touched them. The Hand of Kris… Krist. 

Ha ha.

“C’mere,” he said, this time coaxingly, gesturing with the arm that wasn’t holding onto Zitao and even though the guy still had that stupid deer-in-headlights thing going on, Kris felt him unwinding, relaxing, slowly letting go. 

“Alright, but only because I’m cold, and you’re a fucking furnace,” Zitao mumbled into the hem of Kris’ sweatshirt a moment later. Somehow his head had ended up on Kris’ lap.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kris said, pulling a blanket over the both of them. Over Zitao’s face, too, to shut him up.

 

-

 

Kris rolled out of bed with about five sledgehammers simultaneously slamming morning hellos into his temple and when attempting to pull on his jeans found that they no longer fit. The zipper wouldn’t budge, gaping open in a wide toothy V, and he knew logically there was no way he’d gained twenty pounds in his sleep for his waistline to have expanded this much—on closer inspection, were these jeans even his?

A loud snore sent him jumping from behind.

It was Zitao, faceplanted on the bed, a nest of wayward black hair and one visible eye. T-shirt rucked up to his ribs, stripped down to his boxers for some inexplicable reason. Maybe for the same ludicrous reason that they had both slept in the same bed together.

Without thinking, Kris began scanning for bruises.

“Stop,” he berated himself aloud. “What are you doing?”

Zitao shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. One arm sprawled out across Kris’ pillow, where his head had been just five minutes ago.

“No,” Kris said, and then he said it again. He quickly retraced his steps. They were having a talk. He gave the whole ex-girlfriend, tragic breakup backstory. At some point they made a trip to the Family Mart downstairs, trudged up the five flights hauling several cartons of beer. He looked at the empty green bottles strewn across the floor, and then noticed the stink in the air, the sour alcoholic afterglow.

Right. They were drinking, some drinking game had taken place, Kris kept losing, and then Zitao was touching him with his cold hands, and Zitao fell asleep on his lap, and, and, he was certain that was it.

That was all, he thought, _good_ , and then, _thank god for the snow_. He couldn’t imagine going to work like this.

 

-

 

"I hope you know," Zitao said over breakfast on Monday, "the bathroom stinks the worst after you've used it. What's that stuff you spray all over yourself? It's like a French bakery in there."

It was a gift from Jessica, but Kris kept that to himself. She'd said it made him smell delicious, like her favorite donuts.

“Not man enough for you, huh?” Kris said, leering.

Orfila looked from one to the other, her eyes round and curious. When Zitao left the table to retrieve his backpack, she curled her finger in Kris’ direction. He leaned in.

“What happened? How did you penetrate the impenetrable fortress of Huang Zitao?”

Kris coughed back a laugh. “Fortress?” If anything, Zitao was more of a hut, secluded in the mountains, obscured by miles and miles of trees. But ultimately defenseless when you found your way there. “I don’t know. We had a couple drinks while you were gone.”

 

-

 

Yixing dialed him the minute he signed on. “Just checking up on you. It’s been a while. How are things?” 

“It’s been snowing,” Kris said. “You’re keeping busy? What sort of stuff are you working on?”

Yixing was working on his show for New Year’s at Amsterdam, but that wasn’t the most exciting thing that had happened to him recently. The most exciting thing was—he had discovered someone online. Just a guy and a keyboard, sometimes a guitar, but he wasn’t very good. His vocals, though, were the star of this story. “This guy, I have a feeling—I get shivers, Yifan. Seriously. It’s not that he wows me with his technical proficiency but he’s got a bit of, um—“

“He’s got something that you find interesting,” Kris finished for him.

“Right. Something compelling. I need to meet him. Lend me some of your charm? I don’t want to scare him away at our first encounter.”

“I don’t think you’d scare anyone away. You’re the least intimidating person I know.”

“Huh,” Yixing said. “You think he’ll want to work with me?”

“I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want to work with you.”

“Now you’re just pandering,” Yixing said, but he sounded happy. “I’m nervous, man. I want him to be my Emma Hewitt.” 

“I don’t know what that means,” Kris said. “But I’m sure he’d love to be your Emma.”

“I’ll send you some of her stuff,” Yixing said, nodding into the webcam. “Wait. You never told me about you. Snowing? Did you catch a cold?”

“Nah, don’t worry,” Kris said. “I’m good.”

 

-

 

"I've got a problem," Zitao said after dinner, leaning his head against Kris' door, pushing it open wider, "with this hole."

Kris coughed. "What?"

"In my lobe. I can't tell if it's a blood clot or a pimple, there's a small piece of something right by the piercing, and my nail can't get into it right. Can you check it out for me?"

Zitao was already standing over his desk, bowing his head down towards Kris.

"You can't ask Orfila or something?"

"Are you kidding? She's got that old-people vision problem where they can't see near or far or anything in between."

That wasn't exactly fair, Kris thought. She was in her early thirties but still had the breasts of a twenty-year-old. 

Up close Zitao reminded Kris of the veiny children he'd been friends with as a kid, skin so thin you could trace where everything went. There were stretch marks on Zitao's neck, evident as he pulled it towards the light. Kris couldn't help but think of those birds he sometimes saw on the sidewalk, not the disposable pigeons but the rarer breeds, ones he couldn't name, and how delicate they appeared but -- surprisingly resilient they actually were. 

"Did you have a growth spurt recently?"

Zitao knitted his eyebrows together, thinking. "Yeah, maybe last year. Probably all that milk. Why, jealous?"

"Hey, watch who you're talking to," Kris said. "You don't want these tweezers to accidentally end up in your eye."

"Sorry, _shifu_. How's it look?"

It was a pimple, small and unintrusive next to the piercing. Kris rubbed his thumb once more over the lobe, silky and meaty like a baby’s. He patted Zitao's cheek. "Looks like a zit. Puberty's a bitch, kiddo."

Zitao flipped him off on the way out, closing the door with more force than necessary. Kris laughed until he heard the door click shut and then sunk into his chair, strangely exhausted.

 

-

 

It was weird, being friends with Zitao and privy to all the thoughts he had previously kept to himself.

When Zitao first admitted, "I like to put holes through myself," they were in Kris’ room—Zitao on his stomach against the floor, Kris sitting inches away—and Kris had chuckled, until he realized it was said in earnest. 

"The pain is so profound," Zitao continued, "you know?"

"You're serious," Kris said uncertainly, his lips curled because he didn't know what to do with them. All his life he had been ill-prepared for moments like these. 

In grade school his homeroom class's pet rabbit fell sick and while the girl he'd harbored a crush on since the second grade wept at the windowsill he loomed a few miniature classmates away, not daring to look at the small body of fur heaving its last few breaths within the cage, not knowing what to do with his hands. 

Years later, his best friend was visiting him in Seoul. She shadowed him around his high school for fun and then came out to him during one lunch period. Kris dropped his spork into Wednesday's mystery soup, spent the next few seconds trying to retrieve it without dipping his fingers into the bowl while Amber looked on with a patience beyond her years and outside of the scope of her personality as he had perceived it up until now. "So," Kris said, after wiping the handle clean with a napkin he wasn't sure was his. "You were saying you, uh, I mean—you, uh... good for you, man—wo-man." Thinking about it now Amber deserved a gold star for not dodging the world's most badly-timed shoulder punch that ensued. Kris cringed, remembering.

Back in real time Zitao was observing the scowl that had formed on Kris' face while he unlatched a safety pin from his ear, and he held it below his own wrist one finger's width beneath the pulse, the head of the needle puncturing the skin lightly but not enough to draw blood. Kris didn't realize he'd been clenching his jaw until he felt Zitao's gaze on him, and then his wide teeth-baring grin.

"You wanna try?" 

Zitao's clammy fingers slipped deftly under his wrist, but just as instinctively Kris recoiled, snapping his arm back until it beat against the floorboards, warm from where Zitao had been sitting earlier.

"Maybe," Kris said with a convincing display of control. He rubbed his sore palm where the bruise would bloom several hours later. "Next time."

 

-

 

He was teaching superlatives now, and past perfect tense, and his kids were constantly adding “had” into their homework essays where “had”s were not needed—it was difficult, he knew, because he remembered being that age once, being forced to internalize a second set of sounds against his tongue. He graded papers with a green pen. Red always seemed so dictatorial, demanding in a way that didn’t necessarily yield results.

Zhou Mi slipped into the table across from his and crossed his legs. “So, Mr. Wu.”

Kris looked up from his stack of ungraded homeworks. “Why are you so far away?”

“That’s what we want to ask you,” Zhou Mi said.

Kris glanced around the teacher’s lounge. It was empty but for the two of them. “There’s no one else here.”

“Me and Liu Chao. And everyone else.”

“I’m confused,” Kris said.

“So are we.” Zhou Mi made his saddest frown. “I thought I meant more to you than this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your new best friend and the reason I don’t get to see you anymore. We miss you. Come out with us this weekend! Bring Zitao. Taozi. We don’t care. Any friend of yours is a friend of ours. We just want to see your beautiful regal face again.”

“This royal we thing is creeping me out,” Kris said. “But I’ll ask him. He’ll probably say no. Also, we’re not best friends.” Sure, he was hanging out with Zitao more than usual lately. But they lived together. Flatmates were supposed to be friends. It was normal.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Wu,” Zhou Mi said. “We’ll be waiting.”

 

-

 

Zitao said, “No,” and then, after some coaxing, worried his lower lip and said, “Fine. Okay. Let’s do it. It’s not like I wanted to be a loner this whole time.” He stopped himself, but Kris understood without meaning to. _It just kind of happened that way._ In the same way that Kris couldn’t be a loner even if he tried. They were doomed to each of their separate fates.

“Awesome,” Kris said.

Liu Chao was late, so they met up with Zhou Mi first inside of his favorite club downtown, Sunny. Zhou Mi’s eyes widened upon seeing Zitao in his skinnies and v-neck and then the studded knuckles, the smudged eyeliner. Kris had made an effort to not stare before they left the house, and Zitao had made it easy by pulling over his fur hood and circling his thick knitted scarf a couple times around his neck. It was like walking down the street with a mummy.

He didn’t look bad, Kris thought now, just different. He looked the way someone looked when they were out to get laid.

“Very shuai,” Zhou Mi murmured approvingly, and ordered a round of shots for everyone. “Here’s to Taozi getting lucky tonight.”

Zitao tossed it back, already flushing. Kris palmed the back of his neck. “Take it easy, yeah?” He said lightly.

But Zitao was pulling back, sharing a joke with Zhou Mi. They were laughing about something related to gymnastics. Kris couldn’t hear them, so he flickered his gaze elsewhere. All the pretty girls were out tonight, like they couldn’t stand to be cooped up this winter anymore. The snow had melted, made the ground walkable for their shiny stilettos. Fuck, he still couldn’t look at a girl’s shoes without remembering.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Liu Chao came into view, sweeping in the cold with him, brohugging everyone. “The party has officially arrived. What are you drinking, my man?” He peered into Kris’ glass.

Liu Chao wasn’t lying. Something changed once he got there—or maybe the alcohol was starting to settle in. Within the next half hour everyone looked 100% drunker, and soon Zhou Mi was nodding his head and drifting towards the dance floor. “Lame,” Liu Chao said, following his friend’s lead, disappearing into the crowd of bodies.

Kris was the okay kind of tipsy, but on the downer side, light-headed and a little sleepy. He nursed his drink in his hand and leaned an elbow against the counter, watched as a guy come up to Zitao and start whispering in his ear. Watched as Zitao touched the guy’s arm and began whispering back.

None of it seemed out of character until the guy, grinning, pulled Zitao out of his stool and began leading the way to the dance floor. Kris blinked, and they were already several meters away. It was dark, but he made out the general gist of Zitao moving to the song, which was fucking ancient hiphop from 2008, when hiphop was still sort of a thing, but of course Zitao would be into that. Kris licked around the acrid bitter taste in his mouth and craned his head. He wanted to get a better look at the other ladies in the club but inexplicably his eyes kept returning to Zitao and the dude, where Zitao was swiveling his hips and pressing up against the guy now, grinding up into him, and it all appeared too natural, too—

Hey, he said, sliding down a stool to the girl on his left. She smiled and halted the conversation she was having with her friend.

 

-

 

“Thanks for coming out,” Zhou Mi said, waving at their rolled-down window while propping up Liu Chao with his free arm. “We should do this again soon.”

“Maybe not soon,” Zitao moaned in a muffled voice from the other end of the car. He sounded ill. Kris wondered what Zhou Mi’s secret was. How was he still sober?

“Lots of water and vitamins. I take this energy drink beforehand,” Zhou Mi advised, reading his mind.

“You’re crazy,” Kris said. “’Night, man. Take care of your best friend there.”

“He’s not my best friend,” Zhou Mi said, with a wink.

Silence filled the air which had been previously occupied by Zhou Mi’s voice. Kris closed his eyes against the window, letting the orange lights of the night glow against the outside of his eyelids. A small headache was already beginning to pulse at his temples, the innocuous underling of a massive hangover. Beside him, Zitao spoke first.

“Now you know.”

Kris blearily looked over his shoulder at Zitao. “Know what?”

Zitao’s fur hood was back over his head, hiding his entire face. His voice seemed to emerge from a shadow, or a hole. 

“You saw me tonight. With—“

“—the guy?” Kris finished for him. “Yeah. You looked like you were having fun.”

Zitao was quiet. Kris waited, but he didn’t say anything further.

They arrived at their building, and Zitao didn’t say anything. They walked up the five flights, and Zitao still didn’t say anything.

Kris let him use the bathroom first.

“G’night,” he said, when Zitao came out.

“Night,” Zitao said. He hadn’t gotten all of his eyeliner out. They deepened his already deep eye-circles.

Kris brushed his teeth, washed his face, and changed into his pajamas. He sat on the bed with his knees pulled up to his chest and thought for a moment. The conversation hadn’t ended, he knew. It hadn’t ended there. Zitao was waiting for him to say something else, but he’d been waiting too. He just didn’t know what he’d been waiting for. 

He pressed his forehead against the wall, the thin wall separating them. Maybe if he could figure out what he was supposed to say. Maybe if—

 _Fuck_ , came from the other side of the wall.

Then louder, “Ugh,” followed by—Kris turned his ear now to the cool plaster of wallpaper—a series of distinct sounds, a rhythm he knew like the back of his hand.

Zitao was touching himself, getting himself off. His hand was moving fast, Kris had tuned in to the last push before the release—he was about to finish. His breathing was coming out in little pants, and Kris shut his eyes tight, trying and failing to not think about it. But his mind had no difficulty in conjuring up Zitao next door, lying on the mattress with his jeans yanked down maybe just past the dip of his hipbones, just low enough for him to work his cock free from the confines of his underwear, slipping the slick head in and out of his fist.

By instinct Kris’ own hand moved to palm the outline of his own cock where it had hardened against the zip of his jeans. 

He stopped himself, but he could hear the bed creaking in the next room and imagine the shaking of Zitao’s shoulders as he jerked himself with effort, his face probably twisted into a wince. The tightening of his abdominals as he thrusted up into his fist. 

“Fuck,” Kris gritted out aloud, scrambling for his zipper, and suddenly the room was silent. The room next door was silent. Only the echo of his voice hung in the air, like a punishment for his carelessness. _Shit_ , he thought, _I ruined it_ , disappointment spooling low and deep, but then it started again. The creaking, open-mouthed panting, the sounds Zitao’s hand made sliding up and down his dick.

Zitao finished first, with a curse he didn’t recognize, dirty and guttural and in a dialect, and Kris kept going, biting down on his lip, arching his back against the mattress, trying to think of anything but the reason this was happening in the first place, until he spilled hot and sticky into his hand.

 

-

 

January came and went in a cold but tolerable sweep—Kris took to smoking by his window, taking pains to confine the stench of tobacco to his room so that Orfila wouldn’t worry herself with it. He watched his knuckles whiten against the butt of the stick, blowing wisps of smoke away from his face, into the concrete pavement below. Sometimes Zitao joined him, lying stomach-down on his bed, clicking on his laptop and snorting from time to time at something funny he’d found, a cute comment left on his blog. “What do you have to blog about anyway?” Kris said. “Do you do, like, reviews of different cat cafes that you’ve been to?”

“You’re such a jerk,” Zitao said, elbowing him in the foot, which actually hurt. He must’ve struck a nerve ending, because the pain seared up his calf, rendered him momentarily speechless. Zitao watched Kris’ face contort and laughed, satisfied. “Serves you right, jerk.”

“I’m serious, though,” Kris said, after recovering. “Let me read something.”

Zitao pretended to think about it for a moment before snapping his laptop shut. “No way. Never.” He scrambled up to his feet, having trouble with balance on the soft mattress, his head nearly grazing the ceiling. Kris crawled over and cupped his hands around Zitao’s knees, steadying him. 

“Get your dirty feet off my bed,” he said.

Zitao made a face, looming over Kris. “Get your dirty bed out from under my feet. How handsome am I right now?” He struck a pose, hands akimbo at his waist.

“Five out of ten if I count your face. Seven point five if I don’t.”

“Oh yeah? Well how about I count _your_ face—“ which made no sense but Zitao had fallen back down, smothering Kris with his hands, dragging fingers around his neck. 

At school He Jiong announced the February was peer review month, and Kris found himself deeply engrossed in a week’s worth of Liu Chao’s math lessons, more comfortable with trigonometry than he ever remembered being. Liu Chao was an engaging and entertaining instructor, patient with his kids, good at rewarding the quicker ones while still tending to those that had fallen behind. It came naturally to him, Kris saw now, but the ease with which he taught wasn’t entirely unpracticed, either. He’d honed it to perfection, timing the key points of every lesson to the students’ habitual yawns. Kris jotted down notes in the back row, where occasionally a student or two would turn to stare at him, at his accidentally ombre hair, sometimes stick out a tongue before sliding back into their seat and playing the good boy or girl to Mr. Liu’s exciting class. By the end of the week the page was full.

Halfway through the week He Jiong swapped out Liyin for Zitao—she was getting too pregnant to climb the stairs to his fourth-floor English class, she’d claimed—and Kris had to deal with Zitao’s dark flickering stare every time he glanced towards the back of the room, the smug knowing grin when he stumbled over an English phrase, silly mistakes he never would’ve committed otherwise. Zitao’s presence made him nervous, for some reason, and he ran his chalky palms down the back of his trousers enough times for one of his students to point out that it looked like he’d drawn reverse panda eyes on his buttocks.

“You’re really good,” Zitao said afterwards. “But you need to do something about that hair.” He twisted a lock of it around his pinky, pulled it taut to examine where the blonde phased into black, the lack of spectrum in between.

They insisted, both him and Orfila, that they do it for him. “Bonding scalp-time,” Orfila called it, digging her manicure into his skull and scraping her nails down, calling it a special massage. 

“No happy endings here,” Zitao said from behind, mixing the dye with a brush. Orfila momentarily released her grip on Kris to smack him on the arm, the bottle of hairdye almost flipping over onto the floor.

“Look what you almost did,” Zitao whined. They parted Kris’ hair into sections and began to comb the dye through. The brush swished coolly over his scalp and he waited, palms folded, sweating through the plastic bag they’d secured around his neck with a clothespin.

“Wow,” Orfila said after he emerged from the shower. The bathroom mirror had been too foggy to see anything through; he had only their reactions to rely on.

“Holy angel of death,” said Zitao, darting a tongue over his lip.

He looked alright. It’d been a while since he’d seen himself with black hair—and he couldn’t recall it ever being this black. They’d maybe gone too far while picking the color. This was borderline goth.

“No, I like it,” Zitao said, reaching up to run his hand through it experimentally, soft now that it had dried. Kris bent his knees in compliance and then watched Zitao falter, drop his arm by his side as if he were embarrassed, as if he hadn’t spent the last hour combing through it with his gloved fingers, making sure the dye stuck. “Really, it looks nice,” Zitao repeated, sounding suddenly awkward and heavy, and coughed, cleared his throat and turned away.

 

-

 

“Whoa,” said Yixing. “He’s back.” He leaned in to get a closer look, his whole face blowing up Kris’ screen. “Nice. That’s not a wig, right?”

Kris groaned. “Does it look that fake?” He touched it, instinctively.

“No! I just haven’t seen you with your natural hair color in… how long has it been, a year?”

“It’s been a while,” Kris said.

“Nice to see it making a comeback,” Yixing said, smiling.

They talked about work, about Kris going to visit him in Beijing, even though Yixing was always traveling, flitting from one city to the next, one country to another. “Like an impatient bird,” Kris said. “Hey, how’s your muse doing?”

“My—“ Yixing looked confused. “Oh. The singer I told you about? We met.”

“Okay,” Kris said. “And?”

“It went well,” Yixing said off-handedly, and for the first time in years Kris didn’t know what that meant. There was a switch in his tone, something he couldn’t decipher. Maybe Yixing, too, had his secrets.

“Have you been on Facebook lately?” Yixing asked, out of nowhere.

“Nope,” Kris said, because he hadn’t. He just hadn’t felt the need to log in. It didn’t even occur to him until now that it’d been weeks—half the winter had gone by without him updating his status or writing on his friends’ walls. “Why?”

“No reason,” Yixing said casually. And then, less casually: “Don’t go just because I reminded you.”

So of course he went online.

Seventy-three people had congratulated Jessica Jung on her engagement to Taecyeon Ok.

Kris scrolled down. Amber’s dog was having puppies, a whole family of five now, two of the smallest sucking at her teets on a cot. Henry had checked into a steakhouse with twelve other people on Foursquare. He scrolled back up; the announcement was still there. Jess had changed her profile background to a picture of her name printed across the sky in puffs of clouds, following a “Will you marry me?” written in Korean. Pretty classy, he thought. Better than hiding the ring in a pie or the bottom of a drinking glass, which could’ve led to a choking hazard. They’d joked about it once, when marriage had been little more than an elusive idea, but still an idea, incubating in the back of their minds on the good days. “Don’t you dare,” she’d said, pretending to choke him first.

He didn’t want to think about it. It had passed. Everything had passed. It’d been a year and a half, approaching that mark. He was a different person now. He was doing something he might’ve cared about, maybe, or at the very least cared about more than what he’d been doing before. He was getting by okay. And she was, too. More than okay, apparently. But that was okay, too. That was fine. He wanted the best for her, really. He only wished the best for her, he thought, and in thinking it, realized it was the truth. 

Something had lifted—untwisted the crank in his chest. He took a breath and felt distinctly the air filling him up, the air leaving his lungs. He lay on his bed and felt his body unwind, every muscle falling slack. It was the first real breath he’d taken in months, maybe longer. The thought of it was absurd, that someone could live for weeks on end knowing so little about himself. Paying no attention to himself. Going through the motions of living and somehow convincing the people around him that this was him, living. What a joke, he thought now, and a slow, stunned laugh burned its way through his throat, expelling into the air. What a fucking joke. The laugh snagged, moving his shoulders, bumping them back against the mattress. And then he was crying a little, too.

 

-

 

Orfila was sick. She’d caught the bug that was going around, sending everyone flying for tissues, constantly lowering their face masks to blow their noses. All the cold medicine in the pharmacy downstairs was out. She blamed the dirty elevator buttons for infecting her. “God only knows what kinds of people have touched those knobs,” she said, the sickness making her bitter in a way that Kris didn’t expect but found unexpectedly entertaining.

“Stay away from me,” Zitao said, nudging away as he moved to sterilize all his dishes and drinking cups. 

After a week she decided on self-quarantine. “I’ve called in sick to work for the next couple of days. Nobody wants to hear me spout love advice sounding like I’ve got an anvil shoved up my nose.” She sneezed loudly into her tissue before rolling her suitcase out the door.

“Where is she going?” Kris asked. “Is this normal?”

“She’s going to get an IV drip at the hospital where her boyfriend works, is my best bet.”

Kris had thought Zitao had been joking that one time. “Wait, Orfila has a boyfriend?”

Zitao sat down at the kitchen table. “Well, it’s complicated.”

She was seeing someone, this guy Wei Jia, and had been for several years. On and off. He was older, widowed, with a ten-year-old son that Orfila babysat sometimes. “They have to take him out on dates, you know how kids are,” Zitao said. “She doesn’t really talk about him. Wei Jia. I mean, I know because I live here, but most of the time she says she’s visiting her parents or makes up some excuse so people don’t ask questions.”

That explained why Yixing hadn’t said anything. “What kind of questions?”

Zitao shrugged, but Kris detected a hint of protectiveness beneath the pretense of nonchalance. Maybe Orfila was more of a mother than an older sister to him. 

“You know, like why she’s after this widower, this older man with kids, that kind of thing. If she’s in it for the money. If she’ll be cursed, like the wife, et cetera. It’s pretty sick, what people come up with when they want to bring you down.” 

“Shit,” Kris said. He watched as Zitao made an effort to unclench his fists, which had been wrestling unconsciously with the tablecloth. There was something endearing in the motion, and it pinched his chest, carving a tiny hole there. He weighed his options and thought, To hell with it. Placed his hand over one of Zitao’s—wrenching his hand open until they touched fingertips.

Zitao’s head jerked up, a warm blush instantly creeping into his cheeks, up the back of his neck, coloring his ears. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything, only looked probingly at Kris. He didn’t move away.

“Hey,” Kris said, after a moment. “Are you into karaoke?”

 

-

 

There was a place a fifteen minute walk away that Zitao used to frequent, back when he’d first arrived in Shenyang, friendless and bored, and he’d spent nights there in a booth to himself, belting out the ugliest versions of his favorite rock medleys and older rap songs, the kind of music you didn’t hear on the radio anymore. Kris smiled privately to himself, wondering what Yixing would say to the thinly veiled insult. Yixing proudly made his living off the kind of music you did hear on the radio.

The place was called Solar, the “R” flickering in and out so that at first Kris had read aloud, “Sola,” wondering if it were Latin or Spanish for something interesting until Zitao corrected him. The storefront logo was the word sandwiched between two tacky crescent moons, drawn and outlined in purple paint.

“I like it because they show you the original music videos,” Zitao said defensively, as if Kris had put his indifference on display. “And they give you free beer refills.”

The room was small, bordering on claustrophobic, and the dim lights above bounced off the ceiling disco ball to form ambiguously polygonal shapes on the walls and over Zitao, imprinting on his mouth, his eyes. Kris punched in a Nick Chou song just to get them going; he didn’t even know the melody, but Zitao did, and eventually he joined, making up the tune as he went.

“The beer,” Kris said, hours later. “Is good.”

“Yeah,” Zitao said, cradling a mic between his arms while he lay horizontal on the couch. They were both starting to reek, he could tell, but neither of them cared yet.

“I’m glad we did this. We’re. Doing this.”

Zitao crawled over with his eyes half-closed, and his head dug into Kris’ arm until he made room on his lap. “If I’d met you five years ago, man, it would’ve been dangerous.”

“Mm,” Kris agreed, not really comprehending. They were letting the music go in the background, a Wu Yue Tian song from the early days, and he was humming along, hearing himself hit the wrong notes with relish. His friends back home—Henry, especially, perfect-pitch Henry with his stupid virtuoso violining—would’ve given him such shit for it, they always had a ball whenever it was Kris’ turn to hold the mic, dimming the lights and hushing the room so they could hear each wavering note, amplified through the speakers like a douchey public service announcement. Dicks, all of them, Kris thought fondly, the memories fuzzing through his alcoholic haze. But Zitao was saying something about danger, about Kris. “Hm?”

“I mean,” Zitao said, and adjusted himself, Kris parting his legs to accommodate for this boulder that just happened to be shaped like a head. He glanced down at Zitao and found him looking—just looking, openly, unabashedly, with more than curiosity. He looked at Kris through his dark, dark eyelashes, and under the kaleidoscopic light of the disco ball above, the whole scene appeared to Kris as a premeditated vignette. Cheesy, maybe even a bit pornographic, the way Zitao’s eyelashes fanned out and cast trippy shadows on his undereye circles. Some invisible hand had maneuvered them into this scenario, the same way Kris had been transplanted in the middle of Nowhere, Shenyang, into an apartment with a woman in her thirties he’d never met and her strange young platonic male friend—all from what? From a word of Yixing’s. Right. Kris slumped forward, and below Zitao let out a yelp. When he opened his eyes again their faces were less than five centimeters apart, and Zitao’s breathing had sped up into a panic. Premeditated, huh, thought Kris, looking into the set of eyes mirroring his own, but not mirroring. They were nothing alike, except for the fear. Which crept up Kris’ back now, sure as a New England chill. 

He could so easily just.

But the phone in the room was ringing. Once, twice, shrilly, and Zitao couldn’t jump up fast enough to get it. His hair was all messed up like a cockatiel in the back. _Yeah, okay, got it, we’ll be right out, just after this song ends_ , slurring his words. Kris felt around the couch and underneath cushions for anything they might have forgotten. There wasn’t anything. Zitao held his coat while he paid at the bar, momentarily spacing out over how to sign his name on the receipt. _Kris Wu_? The bartender-owner tapped her nail on the dotted line with the impatient air of someone who’d cleaned one too many vomit-covered toilets in this lifetime. Zitao waited for him at the door and handed him his coat without making eye contact and walked two steps ahead the entire way home. 

“Thanks for paying,” he said in a quiet, sullen voice when they turned into their building and under normal circumstances Kris would’ve wanted to ruffle his hair, say “No problem, kiddo,” but Kris said nothing at all, could think of nothing he knew how to say.

An hour, maybe two, passed, and he couldn’t sleep. He was still keyed up from the singing, from the drinking. From the cold, he told himself. He dangled his legs over the bed and leaned across the desk to turn on his laptop. No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He stepped into his slippers and took a quick glance at the mirror—he looked wasted, sallow-skinned, in dire need of sleep. “Fuck,” he whispered to himself, but something had been set in motion.

The light in Zitao’s room was off, but one short knock was enough for him to respond. “C’min.”

From where Kris stood, awkwardly in the doorway, Zitao looked as small as he sounded, suddenly, as young and unnerving.

“I don’t know—“ Kris began, against the back of his hand, and stopped as Zitao pulled back the comforter and was instantly out of bed and shuffling to his feet. He pulled his t-shirt out of his bottoms where it’d been accidentally tucked in and stopped a few inches away from Kris, looking up directly into his eyes. His t-shirt had been twisted at the collar from overuse, turning in at the outline of a clavicle, and Kris, without thinking, reached over and rubbed his thumb gently against the bone. 

“What are you doing,” Zitao said, hoarsely, maybe from the singing. But he didn’t jerk away; he stepped forward and pressed into it, until Kris’s palm was splayed against his neck.

“My ex is getting married,” Kris said, when no more than a finger’s length separated them. He breathed onto Zitao’s cheek, and Zitao breathed back a faint, “Oh,” sounding dimly of disappointment and something else, that Kris couldn’t pinpoint. He felt Zitao pulling away, brushing off the hand, as though the moment were over and he’d—lost a bet to himself—and instantly resigned himself to it, because that was what Zitao did best, resigning himself to sad things he deserved more than, and Kris couldn’t think as a dull pain grappled in his chest, arriving with it a warm flood of heat.

“No,” Kris said, and pulled Zitao in with both his arms, and felt him struggle, just for a bit, ineffectively, just for show. Slowly, Zitao hugged him back, his own arms coming up from behind Kris and wrapping around him, tight. His weight was foreign and unfamiliar, a heavier, boy’s weight, along with the breadth of his shoulders, the hardness of his body angling against Kris’, but he smelled like the night that had transpired before them, of booze and their own carelessness, what Kris wanted to do next.

He pressed a kiss to Zitao’s neck, aiming for gentle, because it’d been so long. But Zitao’s reaction was immediate, twisting away from him but simultaneously arching into him as he made an uncertain sound in his throat, like hunger. Kris released an arm to cup the curve of his jawline as he pressed his lips to another spot on his neck, still softly, and waited for the shudder, the silent acknowledgment that he was doing okay.

“Good?” He whispered, and Zitao gave a breathless _Yeah_ , eyes shut, rocking his hard-on into Kris’ thigh.

He kissed along Zitao’s jaw, and then just at the corner of his mouth, and then, tentatively, full over the mouth, bringing their lips together in a slow crush. Kris meant to be thoughtful but Zitao was instantly impatient, like he’d waited long enough, and fisted the hem of Kris’ shirt as he kissed him open-mouthed, panting and tangling their tongues together. “Jesus—“ Kris began, laughing, but Zitao didn’t give him the opportunity to break away—just kept going, kissing him.

“You don’t know,” Zitao breathed out, gently grinding against him so that Kris could feel how stiff he was, the defined outline of his cock moving up and down his thigh. “Fuck. _Kris_.” 

“Me too,” Kris gritted out, rocking into it, too. “I’ve thought about—“

He couldn’t finish. Zitao was sucking on his tongue while simultaneously stroking him through his sweats, dragging the heel of his palm over its length with painful deliberation, and Kris couldn’t help it but thrust into the teasing hand, trying to get closer. When Zitao broke the kiss, it was with a dirty quirk of his mouth, and his eyes flickered darkly over Kris as if he were admiring his own work. “You like it?” Zitao whispered with his nose against Kris’ cheek, tugging his sweats down just past his hips, and reveled in the stupid gasp that escaped Kris’ mouth when his hand made contact with his cock. 

“Geez, Kris,” Zitao rasped, rutting his own erection against Kris’ leg as he jerked him from below, making a ring with his index finger and thumb that he’d wet with his own spit. It was still dry but Kris was past the point of caring, half gone already. He was desperately humping into Zitao’s hot hand, dazed with the heat and lust that’d built up inside of him, for weeks and weeks, without even his own knowing.

“I—“ he said, and his voice was embarrassingly shaky as he thrusted harder into Zitao’s fist, “—might have jacked off to you jacking off in your room once.”

“Fuck,” Zitao said, low and throaty in his ear. He had his eyes closed, now, his hand moving as frantically as the swivel of his hips against Kris’. “I thought—I wasn’t sure—but I heard you. Too.”

“That night, I—“

“I was thinking about you,” Zitao choked out and Kris felt the heat in his stomach quietly implode—and then, more violently, as he came shuddering into Zitao’s hand.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said, collapsing against the wall and catching his breath, while Zitao continued rutting against him, still going. “Here, um—“ he had just palmed the curve of Zitao’s cock when he came too, riding out his orgasm with his head tucked into Kris’ neck, shoulders heaving.

They stayed slumped against the wall for minutes, neither with the strength or will to move.

After some time, Zitao pulled back. Kris lifted his head, and they made nervous eye contact. Slowly Zitao grinned at him, and it was the sweetest grin Kris had ever seen. His hair was tangled; he looked like someone messed him up, in the best way. _I did that_ , Kris thought, and kissed him again, soft and lingering.

 

-

 

If darkness lent a forgiving shroud to all transgressions in the night, then daylight was its well-meaning but ultimately evil stepsister, casting a glare on everything you wanted hidden, maybe even forgotten in the morning.

Kris groaned, rolled over, and his nose made contact with a bristly strip of skin—the underside of Zitao’s jaw, he realized, winking open an eye. And then, the smallish red smudge on his neck. And then everything else.

He breathed in the musky boy-scent of Zitao, filtered through the stench of beer between them, seeping from their skin pores, and remembered the grinding, Zitao’s fingers folded around his—yeah. It was too early in the morning for this, even though he was already feeling the stirrings of interest down below. He jerked his head back onto his own pillow, and Zitao made a dissenting sound, shifted in Kris’ direction. His hair fell over his eyes as he rolled onto his left, facing Kris, his arm extended straight out beyond the pillow, and Kris moved his thumb over the wayward strands, brushing them back. Fuck, he thought, because he still wanted to kiss him, looking at the stupid indent of his upper lip. Wanted maybe to slip a hand into Zitao’s boxers, tug on his cock until he woke up, and to see the look on his face when he did. He could already imagine Zitao shading, humiliated, and then not being able to control himself, moaning and going with it.

He slid his arm back under the sheets. It was definitely too early for this.

The morning jog was also a bad idea. He regretted it immediately as the wind began to whip craters into his bones. He wasn't wearing the right shoes, either, just a pair of flat walking sneakers that didn’t offer enough support under his heels as they beat against the pavement, again and again. He made a couple laps around the neighborhood, through the courtyard below, waving hi to Ah-Si every time he passed by. 

The sweat on the back of his neck congealed as he dragged himself back up the five flights of stairs. When he opened the door, Zitao was standing at the fridge, hand around a milk carton. His hair was wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower, which made sense, Kris thought, noting the change of clothes and the nice crisp scent of detergent.

“Hey,” he said, catching his breath and closing the door behind him.

“Hey,” Zitao said, averting his eyes, and when he turned to put the milk back, Kris had another glance at the bruise on his neck, a dark red spot. “You went for a run?”

“Yeah,” Kris said, ready to make a joke about how out of shape he was, but Zitao had already disappeared into his room.

The rest of Saturday went by like this, until it was dark outside. Zitao had been in his room for hours, and Kris was fiddling with the TV remote, trying to find a program that wasn’t about selling him things he didn’t need. Finally he gave up, settling on a period drama. Half of the dialogue was in archaic, unintelligible Chinese, or at least unintelligible to him. He yawned through it, stretching out on the couch. 

When he opened his eyes again, Zitao was leaning over the bookcase in the living room, scanning the titles for something. “Hey,” he said, and Zitao turned around, startled.

“You’re awake?” 

“I am now,” Kris said, clearing the hoarseness from his throat. He pulled his legs in and lowered them over the edge of the couch. “We should talk.”

Zitao was in the middle of retrieving a book, but he pushed it back in with two fingers. “Okay,” he said, and walked over until he was looming, his belt buckle inches away from Kris’ face.

Kris looked up. He wasn’t used to it—seeing Zitao from below, the clear view of his unshaven stubble, his clenched jaw. Beneath the calm mask he detected a strain of defiance, like he just needed Kris to say one word, one word to end it.

He opened his mouth, but Zitao spoke first.

“It’s fine if you regret it,” he said, looking down at his jeans. He twisted his fingers in his belt loops, and then stuffed them in his pockets. “You were out of it. I mean, we both were.”

He lifted his chin a little, to make eye contact. It was a hard, purposeful look that Kris didn’t know how to return without—

“Shut up,” Kris said, and pulled him into his lap. Zitao’s stance was unrelenting at first, but then his knees bent and he allowed himself to be coaxed into the warm space between Kris’ thighs, falling forward with his palms pushed into cushy back of the couch. Zitao made a tight, nervous squealing sound, and they both relaxed, finally, as if unwinding the knot of tension that had thickened throughout the day. “Hey,” Kris said, steadying his hands on Zitao’s narrow waist, wanting to close the distance between them. “Who said anything about regret?”

Zitao let out a soft growl as Kris pressed his mouth to the same place where he’d left the mark, and he kneed into Kris’ thigh, bumping against his crotch. 

“I thought it was a one-time deal,” Zitao whispered into Kris’ forehead. “One of those accidental bonding things.”

Kris pulled back to huff a laugh. “You’re kidding me.”

Zitao curved his mouth, too, but there was a defensive lilt to his voice when he said, “I don’t know,” leaning in for a wet and dirty kiss, sucking on Kris’ upper lip and pushing in with his tongue, then breaking away—“how straight guys operate.”

He was being such a fucking tease, Kris realized, now that he knew he could. It lit a fire in him, a hot twinge of desire. “Fuck you,” he said now, cupping a hand around the back of Zitao’s head, another under his jaw, crushing their mouths together again. “You never asked.”

Zitao pushed Kris away for real now, gently but meaningfully. He was breathing hard and his lips were swelled, puffy and red. “What?” He asked, staring wide-eyed at Kris. First at his mouth, wonderingly, and then into his eyes, with intent. “I’m asking now.”

Kris leaned back into the couch, exhausted from the words he hadn’t yet spoken. Words he hadn’t actually spoken to anyone, ever, not even Amber. Or Yixing. Especially not Yixing.

“In high school, there was a senior,” Kris said, shifting as Zitao crawled out of his lap and into the space beside him, leaning into his arm. He stared straight up into the ceiling, unsure. “I couldn’t tell if I wanted… I couldn’t tell what I wanted from him.”

“Maybe it was just a crush,” Zitao said, and Kris hummed a note of agreement, threading his fingers in Zitao’s hair.

“Maybe.” Kris thought of Yunho, the sharp lines of his body charging across the court, the clean arc of his jumper, swishing in without touching the rim. How easy it had been to mistake the warmth that watching him from the sidelines had infused him with for admiration, or was it the other way around. The heat that surged through him from an innocuous pat on the back, a friendly half-hug. He’d written it off as a crush, too, but—“I guess, before that, there was someone else.”

“Yeah?”

Kris nodded, even though the memory of it seemed so far away now, almost ludicrous. “We’d pretty much grown up together, like, you know, stupid little kids who lived next door to each other. That sort of shit. But he had a thing for this girl, forever, I mean years and years. And I never really thought about it, as a kid, like I just felt—it was always easy between us. You didn’t have to think about it. By the time I figured it out, I was already in the States, had been dating Jess for a year, and he was still here.” Kris paused, laughing. “I don’t know, it feels pretty stupid now.”

Zitao was quiet, and Kris thought, maybe he didn’t know what to say. Hell, Kris didn’t know what to say, after that. But then:

“You wanted to blow him?” Zitao asked.

His eyes were shining. Kris bit back another laugh. “Wow. Um. I don’t know. Maybe once upon a time,” he finished, and Zitao grinned, nudging Kris’ knees apart to ease himself in between them.

He circled his arms around Kris’ shoulders and said, with a curious smile, “You wanna blow me?”

Kris sucked back a breath as Zitao pushed into him, hard and heavy below. “Fuck, yeah. I do.”

 

-

 

“It smells really,” Orfila began, sniffing around the kitchen. She padded into the living room and sniffed there, too. She still had her gloves on, her suitcase parked by the door. Her hair was tangled from the beanie but the cold had brought some color into her cheeks, and she looked human again, not the congested teary mess from a week ago. Her boyfriend must’ve done his boyfriendly duties, Kris thought.

“—Fresh,” she finished. “Did you guys clean up while I was gone?” She folded her arms and looked from Zitao to Kris. “I’m impressed.”

Zitao flashed her a beatific smile and exaggerated a nod, pulling his chin up and down. “We cleaned everything.”

They did, but not before making a mess of the place, which Kris couldn’t recall without heating up, even if it’d only been hours since Zitao sucked him off in the bathroom, then on the kitchen table, where Kris felt unusually vulnerable spread out over the cold imitation wood, almost clinically hard underneath his back. He pictured Zitao sleeping like this at the monastery, on his stubborn straight back, and then looked down at the Zitao in front of him, the obscene image of his head bobbing up and down between Kris’ thighs while he licked up the length of his cock, traced its slight leftward curve with his tongue. Kris had gripped the side of the table, cursing through the shock of his orgasm, bucking his to ride out the last frantic waves against his own hand after Zitao had pulled off and was licking his mouth clean where some of the come had spurted onto it because Kris had been a second too late in warning him. “I’m sorry, fuck, I’m sorry,” Kris said over and over, but Zitao leaned over the table to press a grin against his lips, prying open Kris’ mouth with the bitter taste of his own spunk.

“How thoughtful,” Orfila said, genuinely touched, peeling off her gloves. She patted Zitao lightly on the cheek and for once he didn’t refuse, preening into it instead.

 

-

 

Henry was switching jobs, and he had two weeks to kill before starting at his new company, which promised better benefits, better insurance, free lunch every Wednesday and a $30 dinner allowance for the occasional late night at the office. “That’s including an appetizer, an entrée, and a drink. Sometimes I text my roomie and ask if he wants chicken fingers or something—it depends on the menu, of course.”

Anyway, he said, he wanted to visit Kris. Late March, I’ll send you an Outlook invite for our weeklong date. With a wink and kissy-face into the webcam.

Kris grinned. “I don’t even use Outlook anymore.”

Henry said he sucked, and then, that he was looking forward to catching up with his favorite bro. Besides Amber.

Besides Amber, Kris agreed.

Kris picked him up at Taoxian Int’l two weeks later, and nothing about Henry had changed, from his letterman jacket to the spiked-up ‘do he’d worn religiously every day since the fifth grade. Somewhere in his early twenties, right out of college, gaunt from the dreariness of his six-month unemployment, he’d lost some weight, but all that was back now, plus more, Kris noted, in the slight roll of his belly and fullness of his cheeks.

“You know what they say about happiness,” Kris joked, with a light jab to his stomach, and Henry punched him in the arm, then hugged him, saying, “I missed you, man.”

Half a year had gone by, and Kris hadn’t been properly sightseeing yet, so he used Henry as an excuse to hit up all the list of places Yixing had emailed him back in August. “Oh yeah? How’s that guy doing?” Henry asked while they strolled down a busy underground shopping mall, storefronts packed tightly adjacent to one another. Henry picked up a string of bangles adapted from earrings and asked in his Saturday school mando how much it was.

“For you, pretty boy, I’ll make an exception,” said the ah-yi. Kris made a signal behind her, pushing the heel of his palm down to mean she was probably ripping him off.

“He’s doing pretty well,” Kris said. “I saw his latest song broke into the Billboard top 100, something crazy like that.”

“Oh snap, that was him?” Henry raised his eyebrows and slammed his hand against Kris’ arm. “Hold up. My coworkers were telling me about some Chinese dude making waves in the house/trance scene but I didn’t know he went by ‘Lay.’ That’s… that’s _sick_.”

“I know, right,” Kris said. “Good for him, man.”

“Yeah, seriously. Wow.”

They stopped in front of another shop, filled with scarves and gloves and other assorted knitwear. Henry pulled a mouse-eared aviator hat over his head, turned to Kris, and asked, “Hey, remember the beanie Amber made me that one Christmas? Before you left?”

For half a decade, Henry had been the reason for Amber’s sexual crisis. She’d had crushes on girls, but then there’d been Henry, always a friendly punch and comforting bear hug away. A gray area. “I don’t knowww,” she’d wailed into the phone with Kris for years, even after his move to Beijing. “It’s all so confusing.” It was, Kris thought then. It was still now. “Tell him what I said, and I’ll kill you,” she’d warned. Kris had never told.

“Yeah, that thing was an insult to, like, knitters everywhere,” Kris said, laughing. “I’m still kind of hurt she only got me this lotion from Bath and Body Works. C’mon, what am I? Your leftovers? I swear, the shit even glittered.”

“She knew the well-moisturized clean freak you’d become,” Henry said sagely, and narrowly dodged the fist in transit to his face. “Of course, Kris Wu has more of a natural sparkle to him,” he added before breaking into a panicked run.

Kris was faster. He’d always been faster. “Fuck you,” Henry said, fondly, hunched over his knees and catching his breath.

He was staying at a fancy hotel downtown, with a decked out vestibule and staff that bowed ninety-degrees to them every time they emerged from the shiny mirrored elevator. Kris crashed for half the week, sending texts to Zitao while Henry was in the shower. We ate here, we saw this today. He took photos of random things, like a scroll painting of a man and a giant peach at one of the restaurants they’d visited, or a balloon printed with a panda face that he’d spotted a little blond girl holding, delicately with the string tied to her thumb. Zitao responded with feelings and hearts, separated by miles of ellipses, and sometimes a photo of himself, biting down on his lip, tugging at his collar. A massive embarrassment to receive while anyone else was in the room, but alone Kris allowed himself to be filled with the same heady affection that was rapidly becoming Zitao’s theme song, their fucking sonata. 

He stuffed his phone back into his pocket when Henry came out of the bathroom saying, “Oops. Probably used up all the hot water just now.” 

They stayed up every night drinking and talking, sometimes trash-talking, stupid stuff he hadn’t done in a while. It was weird, a different kind of comfort, speaking in English to someone who wasn’t thirteen years old and a native Chinese. He heard how stilted his words came out sometimes, even if Henry didn’t call him out for them.

“You happy? You look happy,” Henry said while they were waiting in line behind a crowd of tourists for Manchurian food. It was supposed to be the best in the area—Yixing said so.

Kris blew out a breath of air against his hands, warming them. “Yeah, I’m doing alright. Why, you can tell?”

Henry laughed. “I’ve known you since you were a wee lad.” His voice went up as “wee,” took on a poor imitation of an Irish accent. It was seriously terrible. “Lemme guess… you’re seeing someone.”

“I,” Kris paused, “guess you can say that.”

“Why the uncertainty? Does she have a little,” Henry made a jumbled hand gesture, “something something on the side?”

“No! Nothing like that. I don’t know, it’s weird. I mean.” He thought of Zitao, curled up against him on the couch when Orfila wasn’t watching, the way his arm fit around him, the hard squeeze of his bicep under Kris’ hand. The fuzz of hair on his stomach leading lower, gathering there. He cleared his throat. “She’s younger.”

Henry looked surprised. “Really? I thought you were gonna chase after jiejies your whole life.”

“Alright, it sounds gross when you put it that way.”

“What, ‘jiejie’? That’s what she was, right? Two years older?”

A year and a half, but they weren’t splitting hairs here. “Yeah, but you sound like a little kid. _Jiejie_.” Kris shuddered, and then grinned. It wasn’t fair to be taking digs at Henry’s Chinese but he couldn’t help it. He had missed this. Not being the one to suck the most, for once.

Henry made a face. “But is it an issue? Her being young.”

Kris cringed. “Younger. ’93. Not like, _young_.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. Oh my god, stop being so dramatic,” Henry laughed, hopping from one foot to the other. He was tragically underdressed for the weather. They were moving up the line, at least.

Kris laughed, too, because it was true. Three years meant less the older you were. Hardly noticeable at thirty and thirty-three; barely anything if you got to be in your forties, fifties, seventies. But that rode heavily on the _if_.

“The thing is, how do you feel when you’re with her? How does she make you feel?”

Henry, the love guru. Kris bit back a grin, remembering. He’d always wanted to help, always the most dependable, which had surprised them all. Just like when he’d traded in his acoustic guitar for his current accounting gig—no, it was a whole divergence from his childhood life plan, trees they’d mapped out on the back of their geometry worksheets. They were supposed to be rockstars. But instead Henry had cut off his Youtube account, all fifty thousand followers. Someone made a spinoff of the Justin Timberlake, Make Music Again PSA, turned it into a Henry Lau, You Fucking Canadian, I Even Miss Your Justin Bieber Covers PSA. Seven hundred some-odd likes. But he’d shrugged them off, like it was the easiest thing— _Gotta be someone my family can depend on. You know?_ And in it Kris had heard, even if it wasn’t implied, the echo of his own negligence. 

“Pretty amazing, actually,” Kris said, trying for earnest, for once, and also because it was one of the few things he knew at the moment to be true.

 

-

 

By the time Kris returned from the airport it was already past one in the morning, and he tiptoed into the apartment, trying not to wake either of its inhabitants. Zitao’s light was off, he noted with a dim sinking feeling, but it was late and they had work tomorrow. He'd just been hoping. 

It was possible he’d gotten attached.

He brushed his teeth, washed his face, went through the nightly regimen of eye creams and skin moisturizers and had been lying in bed for a few minutes with his eyes closed, not thinking of anything in particular, when the door opened with a low creak, a set of feet padded into the room, and the bed dipped with a familiar weight. Familiar hands coming around him from behind, threading under his arms, hugging him around the belly. 

Zitao buried his nose into Kris’ shoulder and mumbled, “I missed you.” He smelled like he’d been wearing the same set of pajamas for a week; it was thick with his musk, casing both of them like a snug cocoon. But his hair carried the light scent of shampoo, and Kris twisted his head a little, breathing into it. He slipped his hand over Zitao’s, entangling their fingers together, pressing them close to his chest.

“Mm,” he said, already falling asleep. “‘Night, big spoon.”

 

-

 

The next time Yixing called, it was already April. Too early for flowers but little buds were emerging, green and full of promise. He saw them from the living room window, littering the heads of trees below. Kris was beginning to go out for regular jogs, having lost all his stamina in the past half year—more than that, since he’d given up his gym membership even earlier. Zitao had teased him about the stomach roll, nudging it with his nose, licking at it. “Good?” he’d asked, mockingly, and Kris would’ve grabbed him by the hair if his balls hadn’t been dangerously cupped in Zitao’s hand.

Yixing was starting to make enemies. “That’s how you know you’ve made it,” Kris said. “Who is this guy anyway?”

“Some dude named Deadr4t or something, I don’t know,” Yixing said, but he looked distressed. “I heard he hasn’t been relevant since 2012?” He moved out of the frame, clacking away at his keyboard. A link appeared in the chatbox next to Yixing’s Skype handle. 

“‘Deadr4t Accuses Newcomer Lay of Boring Button-pushing’?” Kris scanned the title of the article. “What does this even mean?”

Yixing moved back into the webcam. “Not creative enough. Not original enough. I don’t know. He’s calling me the Chinese David Ghetto of 2016. Hey, at least David Ghetto’s still producing.”

“Also,” Kris added, because this was the one name he recognized. He’d definitely jammed to some of his stuff in the club. “He’s a multimillionaire who dates Playboy bunnies on the regular.”

“And that,” Yixing said. “Different strokes, but yeah.”

“Right,” Kris said. “Fuck this Deadr4t guy. Who does he even think he is? He’s probably, like, a bitter old dude in front of his laptop by now.”

“He’s thirty-five, I think. But yeah, fuck him.” Cursing seemed to help, as Yixing brightened and began talking about shooting his first music video. There was going to be a lot of strippers in the background, so many of them that you didn’t even notice them anymore, just a sea of legs and tits in tiny bikinis. "You could get meta about it, if you wanted to."

“What about your muse? Your singer guy? He’s gonna be in it too, right?”

“Nah,” Yixing said. “I don’t think so. Neither of us are too keen on being in front of the camera. He’s kind of awkward when it’s more than just a few of us recording in the same room.”

That was interesting coming from Yixing, who generally mistook people’s chins for their eyes, zoning in on your neck as he engaged you in thoughtful conversation. “I was looking forward to seeing what he looked like,” Kris said. “You’ve been really mysterious about this guy.”

He had, and Kris could tell he knew it, by the way he was staring dumbly into his keyboard now. “Yeah, someday you guys will meet. It’s just weird. I feel… don’t laugh, okay?”

“Okay. I won’t laugh.”

“Alright.” Yixing took in a deep breath. “I feel…uh. I think…”

Kris leaned in. “You think…”

Yixing tried again. “I think…”

“Dude, just say it. I’m not going to laugh. What’s going on?”

“I think I’m in love.”

Yixing leaned back, as if an enormous weight had been lifted off his chest. He said it again. “I think I’m in love.” This time with wonder.

Kris wasn’t laughing, but he kind of wanted to. The first time Yixing admitted this had been in grade school; the last time was half a decade ago and still about the same girl, but with a twisting note in his voice, sad and resigned. “That’s it? I mean, congrats. Wait. You mean, with...”

Yixing looked directly into the webcam, and it was scary, having the full weight of Yixing’s gaze on him. “I’m not sure, though. I might just be in love with… his soul, or something.”

Now Kris was laughing.

“Shut up,” Yixing said miserably. “You haven’t heard him sing.”

He did, later. Yixing caved and finally sent him a video, a homemade low-res one the guy had posted on his own channel, before getting scouted by Yixing. The guy wasn’t the best singer, although he was good. Decent, better than the average, no doubt. He had the face of someone impossibly younger, an eerie Rip Van Winkle, and a clear, guileless voice. From the video itself Kris could tell he was probably a nice guy. Fun to hang out with. Not a douchebag. Kris understood how Yixing could’ve seen something in him, how he could’ve been affected to this degree. Sometimes you just had no way of knowing.

 

-

 

Zitao found him in his free lunch hour, mulling over whether to deduct one point or two off one student’s paper for her repeated misspelling of “bulbous.” But the fact that she had dared to use the word at all, despite its not having been in any of their assigned readings, had impressed him, so he felt inclined to be lenient with her—or was that the definition of partiality? He frowned, unsure. Through the small window of the door Zitao was waving wildly at him, and then he’d stormed in, grabbing Kris by the sleeve, saying, “Let’s go somewhere.”

Kris had hardly caught his dark, needy expression before they were out the door, rushing down the stairs, and Zitao was pushing him into an empty classroom on the third floor, kissing him and pinning him up against the blackboard.

“Whoa,” Kris got out, dizzy from the last minute of his life, and there would’ve been an ending to that sentence had Zitao’s hands not been roaming, pulling out his shirttails from where they were tucked into his pants, deftly undoing the buttons until he felt the cool air settle over his bare chest, his neck. 

Through the window of the door Kris made out the top of Haitao’s head approaching from down the hall, and Zitao, following his line of vision, dragged them both to the floor, Kris’ back hitting the tiles with a thud he knew he’d feel later. “Shh,” Zitao hushed him, holding up a finger to the devilish turn of his mouth, and Kris was already having difficulty not imagining his cock there, Zitao’s lips stretched around it and his brow furrowed in concentration, the inversion of his cheeks as he sucked on it—hard and choking a little. With a light click Zitao had locked the door, but when Kris made to get up, he was pushed down again, Zitao’s grinning face slowly coming into view as he kneeled over, encasing Kris’ waist between his legs.

“I want you,” Zitao said, in a low growl, a rumble sliding up Kris’ chest, and tenderly licked into his mouth, teasing with his tongue, “to put it in.”

Kris’ eyes widened, because they hadn’t done this yet, he wasn’t sure they were ready, but he felt his cock stiffen at the suggestion, straining up against his pants. “Easy,” Zitao laughed, feeling it too, and he groped it through the layers of material, running his palm in a circular motion over the head until Kris gritted his teeth and said, “Don’t play around, Huang Zitao.”

“Make me stop, Wu Yifan,” Zitao dared, his voice suddenly raised a pitch.

Kris stared at him and understood, suddenly, how badly Zitao needed to be fucked. Needed Kris to do it. And how badly he wanted to help.

Fuck, did he want to help.

“Alright,” he said, nervously licking his lips, and Zitao watched, equally tense. He was new to this—all the other stuff had been kiddie play, he knew from messing around in college, the occasional townie in a bar after an exceptionally stressful week—that had been how he’d unwind, back in the day, before Jess—but never with classmates, never anyone he had a chance of meeting again, and never—actually putting it in. Putting his dick in someone’s mouth was alright, because it allowed him some level of self-delusion, like if he closed his eyes it wasn’t really happening, even if it felt fucking incredible and he just wanted to do it forever. 

But it was different with Zitao. He always wanted to see Zitao, watch his face as he went down on him, or watch his face as they switched, Kris taking him in nervously, licking over the dark cockhead just experimentally at first while Zitao made encouraging moans and breathy, “Oh yeah”s, “That’s it, _fuck_ ,” later hitching his hips to fuck up into Kris’ mouth as he struggled to keep up.

With Zitao he wanted to know, to document everything, just like now—Zitao’s hand shakily reaching into his back pocket, pulling out a strip of condoms and then, a small inconspicuous bottle. They were going to do this, and Kris hoped to god he could keep it up long enough, that he wouldn’t embarrass himself from being too excited. Because that was what he was right now, practically trembling, heart thudding from the idea—imagining Zitao stretched open around him, hot and suffocating, impossibly tight.

“It’s okay,” Zitao said as though he understood, shaken with new resolve. “I can, um—“ and he stripped off his button-down shirt, pulling it over his head after loosening the first couple buttons, and Kris leaned back on his palms, watching him then unbuckle his jeans, pull them down from his legs, one at a time, and then tugging off his boxers too, where his cock was already peeking out from under the waistband, swollen against the slit. Zitao’s body was solid, lithe, and Kris couldn’t remember ever seeing it like this, totally unobscured as daylight streamed down past the ridges of his abdominals, illuminated how fucking beautiful and perfect he actually was. He wanted to touch him, but Zitao was caught up in his own performance, slicking his fingers and then, lifting his hips, sliding one in, sliding it back out, repeating.

This was new, this was definitely new, but it wasn’t new to Zitao, who added another finger, falling back on it with a grunt, bending backwards a little while balanced on his knees. He closed his eyes, and Kris slid over, steadying a hand over his hip. “You look so good like this,” Kris said, the words coming out thick and stupid, but he didn’t care. He rounded his hand over Zitao’s half-hard cock and stroked it slowly, following the rhythm of Zitao fingering himself. Zitao added a third finger, and Kris bent down to lower his mouth over his cock, deep-throating it like he’d been practicing, and listened in heated pleasure as Zitao made a choking sound and his hand found purchase in Kris’ hair, grabbing a fistful.

Then, “Ready,” opening his eyes and flashing them at Kris, expectantly. “Okay,” Kris murmured, scrambling to tug down his own pants and peel away the boxers, letting his cock finally spring up from the heavy sequesters of fabric, clumsily rolling on a condom. Zitao made to turn and get on all fours, but Kris pulled his hand, accidentally linking fingers. “I want to see you,” he said hoarsely, and Zitao nodded, smiled, small and surprised.

“Lie down,” he said, and then lowered himself onto Kris’ cock.

The heat was instant and incredible, and how tight Zitao wrapped around him, how immediately he clenched, and claustrophobic and perfect, Kris thought, words becoming incomprehensible as he thrusted up slowly, his hands cupping Zitao’s buttocks. Zitao was panting softly through his mouth, he couldn’t tell how good it was because of the precarious position, with Zitao’s body bent into a broken bridge, his palms rooted against the floor as he rode Kris, sliding up and down his cock. But they worked at it, finding a good pace for the both of them, letting it build, until,

“Fuck, I’m tired,” Zitao said, and turned ever so slowly, Kris still inside him, maneuvering so that he was now on his elbows and knees and Kris was kneeling behind him, pushing in that way. From here he could count all the knobs in Zitao’s spine, and in one particular long thrust he leaned over, licked at the topmost, most jutting one, and felt Zitao tremble beneath him and begin to stroke himself. And it got better like this, Kris closing his eyes now as he pumped harder, his hips moving mindlessly, with the roaring of blood in his ears and Zitao gasping, _Yes_ , then _Kris_ , and the slapping sound of skin against sweaty sticky skin. Zitao buckled first, the force of his orgasm weakening his knees, and Kris pushed in close behind, fucking the furious last few strokes before collapsing over the cool skin of Zitao’s back.

They lay breathing heavy against the floor for some time, and then Kris rolled him over, he wanted to see him, like he’d said. Zitao still had his eyes shut, but his mouth was curled in contented exhaustion, and he looked so utterly spent and young that Kris couldn’t help it, had to kiss him, roll their tongues together, smiling.

“Gross,” Zitao said when he finally caught his breath, and Kris said, “Yeah. Gross,” the laughter between them a warm and contagious current, their bodies the only mandatory conduit.

 

-

 

His ex, the only person Zitao paid attention to for the first two years of high school, had sent him an email during lunch. _I still think about us_ , Zitao dictated aloud. _That time we_ —and he broke off, stuffing the phone under his pillow. “It’s not important,” he said but sounded like something had gotten caught in his throat. “I’m done with him.”

Kris said he wanted to know, if that was okay.

They’d met the first year of high school, and the boy was a year older, taller and toward the graceless end of lanky. A natural bully, always shoving around the smaller kids in the hallway, pushing the limits of a good-natured joke, and they’d still gravitate towards him, in the way of flowers to the sun. The rumor was he’d been a chubby kid, made fun of throughout his earlier formative years, and the memory of it had embittered him, sending him down a vicious karmic cycle. 

“But he wasn’t like a _bad_ bad person. Just a real douche, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have been so…obsessed, I guess. If he weren't.”

“Obsessed,” Kris said, rolling it around in his head, and Zitao sighed, “Yeah.”

He’d been a stupid, gullible kid, he said. Too quick to anger, and simultaneously, too easily awed. Zitao laughed sourly at the memory. Something about Canlie had wrung out the worst of it in him, hanging up the pathetic zealousness for all to see. When Canlie pushed him around, slamming him against a row of lockers, he pushed back. Fisting in his shirt. He couldn’t help it. He always wanted more, to see how far he could get.

One day Canlie had said, “Follow me,” and stalked into the boy’s bathroom, ducking his head to check for feet under the stalls. Zitao was rubbing his shoulder from where it’d been bruised earlier, and then Canlie said, “Lock the door. Fuck, I said, _lock it_.” He cursed when Zitao was too slow and shocked to respond, running over to turn the latch himself, thundering back red-faced and angry. Zitao couldn’t even remember why or how they got here, only that he’d been talking to a friend about a fantasy epic he’d been reading, and that Canlie, passing by, had shunted in between them, made a snide remark about Zitao’s hobbies, condescendingly patting his jaw. Zitao could’ve let it go, but he didn’t want to—“I _couldn’t_ ”—and swatted the hand away, eyes blazing into Canlie’s. Then the usual shoving, feeble punches from both sides—Zitao not wanting to hurt, Canlie not knowing how.

“You little fucker,” Canlie growled, when he had Zitao backed up against the wall, and decked him in the mouth.

He felt his lip split in the center, the raw sensation of pain burning up his jaw. Zitao knew he could’ve easily retaliated— _broken_ Canlie, twisting his arms behind him until they bent the wrong way—but he’d discovered a sick delight in the waiting, and a sickness in himself. Anticipating Canlie’s next move, he shut his eyes and licked over the bloody lip. Before him came a lower growl, a hot breath on his cheek, murmuring, “Jesus Christ,” and then Canlie was on him, sucking on his lower lip, gripping the base of his neck and fucking his tongue into his mouth.

“He was my first,” Zitao said. “God, I was so embarrassing. This went on for two years. Can you imagine?”

He was his first, and his second, and his third, and after a certain point Zitao stopped counting, just allowed himself to be slowly pried apart, brilliantly undone and then forcibly pulled back into reality as Canlie shuffled to his feet, buttoning his student uniform with his back to him, not saying a word. They did it everywhere. Canlie had a bewildering exhibitionist streak, wanting to fuck in stairwells, fitting rooms, anywhere he could get his hand down Zitao’s pants and then, Zitao on his dick, his dick inside Zitao.

“I was really—just a dumb kid. Like so, so dumb. I told him I _loved him_ , and for a second I thought he was going to punch me again, like that time in the bathroom, but instead he laughed—crazy-laughed,” Zitao said, and Kris understood how that was worse.

They broke it off when Canlie got a girlfriend his senior year, a cheerleader and former ballet dancer, to add insult to injury, as if he’d finally found the female version of Zitao. He’d recounted the way she could raise her leg beyond her head, how tight she was, before turning to Zitao with an ugly intentional sneer, saying, “So let’s end it here, alright?”

It had taken all of Zitao’s practiced restraint, years of martial discipline to calm the edges of his anger and reply with an even, “I understand.” He pulled up his trousers, tucked in his shirt, and never looked at Canlie again. Never had to, because in a few months he’d be graduating, anyway.

Second most difficult thing, Kris remembered him saying. 

“Is that when you went to become a monk?” He joked.

Zitao shoved him to the other side of the bed. “Yeah. You know me so well already,” he said, after a moment, and pulled Kris back in, craning up for a kiss.

“You were frustrated today,” Kris said softly into his mouth. “So you found me.”

“Don’t put it that way,” Zitao complained, which meant _Yes._

He broke the kiss, nuzzling his head into the crook of Kris’ neck, breathing deeply there. “I just didn’t want my last memory of fucking in a school to be of him,” he mumbled, and Kris shouted out a laugh, ramming his fist into Zitao’s hair, messing it up in pretend anger.

 _What kind of man would drink at noon and start drunk-texting his high school fucktoy_ , Zitao wondered aloud a sleepy moment later, and Kris said, _The kind of man that let you go_ , grazing his thumb against Zitao’s cheek. It earned him a swift kick under the sheets before Zitao glanced over and caught the expression on his face, the way Kris had intended it. 

Oh, he said then, and then smiled, privately, before burrowing his head into the comforter.

 

-

 

Principal He called him into his office. The first thing Kris thought was that he and Zitao had been caught on tape, on secret cameras planted in that classroom, their desperation immortalized in the film. But no, Principal He wanted to talk about opportunities for growth, about Kris’ future.

“You’re young,” said He Jiong. “I wouldn’t want you to feel pigeon-holed in this place when there are greater opportunities elsewhere.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Kris said. It had occurred to him, but he’d pushed away the thought each time. He was in a good spot right now. He didn’t want to ruin it.

Principal He nodded with understanding. He remembered being that age, he said, and how it’d felt constantly trying to stay afloat while maintaining the luster of youth. “A battle against time,” he concluded, adding with a grin, “but it’s infinitely easier if you stop battling altogether.”

Kris no longer knew what they were talking about. Principal He cleared his throat and continued where he’d left off. There was another branch of his Academy, a sister school in Beijing, which was run by his good friend and longtime colleague Principal Han. They needed to tighten up their faculty, bring in some fresh blood. They were looking for English teachers, but they were also thinking, he said, cocking his head at Kris, of starting a basketball team.

“Zhang Yixing told me you used to play? And well.”

“I was center,” Kris said. “Not that great, though.”

“You did a good job at Spirit Day,” the principal insisted.

“That was all Zhou Mi,” Kris said, although they had spent afternoons brainstorming, Kris fighting him on some of the plays. 

The principal waved his hand, and then said that he’d referred him to Principal Han. It wasn’t an obligation, of course, just a suggestion, but he thought Kris could benefit from a change of scenery—“A wider view, perhaps,” he added. “It’s up to you. I like to look out for my faculty, encourage them to move on when the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes I may overstep my boundaries—“

“No, no, not at all. I—thank you,” Kris said. “I appreciate it. Really. I just—would like some time to think it over.”

“Of course,” said Principal He. He paused, and added, with a bemused smile. “Yixing would be there, too.”

He would. But Kris was thinking of someone else, the heavy head on his shoulder he woke up to some mornings, the cold feet pressed up against his calves at night. Of the forced discretion and lust—lust that ripped out of him sometimes when he caught the nape of Zitao's neck bent at an angle, nose dipping into his cereal bowl—and something else he wasn’t ready to admit, more slippery and dangerous. He could imagine missing it, all of it. He was already missing it.

The air pulled unexpectedly out of his lungs, and he suddenly found himself choked up, coughing, having to cut the conversation short so that he could excuse himself, escaping to the bathroom, splashing water onto his face and watching it run down, repeating to himself in the mirror, “It’s alright. You’re still here. You’re alright.”

 

-

 

Zitao was antsy the whole day and made his best efforts to hide it, but it seeped into the way he danced from foot to foot while washing the dishes over the sink, the cloying sweetness with which he complimented Orfila’s hair over dinner, and some of his nerves transferred to Kris in kind, but mostly they skated over him, left him with the same clawing fondness that turned again and again in his chest.

“We’re heading out,” Kris said, heaving a large knapsack over his shoulder. Orfila waved absentmindedly from the sofa where she was engrossed in her favorite reality TV show. “Wait, when are you coming back?” He heard her yell a moment later, but by then they had already turned the corner, speeding down the stairs two steps at a time.

“Don’t expect anything,” Kris said, guiding Zitao through the last door up onto the roof of the academy. He unfolded a lawn chair and gently lowered Zitao into it. Zitao was grinning stupidly the entire time, asking every five minutes, “Can I take it off now?” but now that he’d untied the blindfold, he just stared at the clutter of stars above, not saying anything.

“Happy birthday,” Kris said, pressing a kiss to his forehead, and dragging it down the bridge of his nose, meeting his lips. 

He pulled out a blanket and smoothed it over the concrete flooring, while Zitao tried to read the French label on the wine bottle, plucking at the cork. It was early May. The ground still hadn’t warmed up from the winter, but the air was cool and light against their skin, and the alcohol massaged into their stomachs. Lying down, Zitao tilted his head and leaned in for sticky making out under the unclogged sky, a rarity as though reserved for just this occasion. 

When they broke apart, Zitao folded his arms behind his head, grinning his deliciously ravished mouth toward the stars.

Kris turned into his side, propping up on an elbow. His mouth was numb with the taste of Zitao, the bitterness of the wine they shared. “Hey, what’d you write in my evaluation?”

“Hm?” Zitao said. “Oh. I’m not telling you.”

“C’mon.” Kris nudged him with his arm. “I wanna knowww. Tell me how to improve.”

“Well, if you insist.” Zitao rolled onto his side, too. His eyes were dark with mischief. “You could start by pulling your lips over your teeth so I don’t have to worry about getting defiled by your canines every time.”

Kris tackled him, and they wrestled until he had him pinned against the blanket, hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay,” Zitao cried, laughing. “I cave.” He struck a seductive damsel in distress pose. “You can collect your prize now.”

Kris swallowed. “Actually, I got something for you.”

He pulled out the small gift box, watched as Zitao opened it, examined between his fingers the metal cuff earring, shaped as a wing. “It’s dumb, I know, I really couldn’t think of what to get you, but in high school they called me… like, on the basketball team, they called me the Black Angel, as a joke, you know, but it got to be a thing, kinda caught on—“

He stopped, because Zitao had leapt on top of him, hugging around his waist and digging his nose into his neck. “Stop explaining, you loser,” he whispered, sounding like he might cry. “I love it.”

Kris put it on for him, carefully removing a stud that had been in the way. It looked ridiculous, tacky as hell, but Zitao could pull it off with that delirious grin, he could pull off anything if he believed in it.


End file.
